Dana Foundation Blog

Dana Newsletter for May

Below is the latest Dana email newsletter, sent earlier this month. You can sign up to receive this (and other Dana email alerts and/or print publications) by going here.

The Role of Stress in Brain Development

by Claudia Buss, Ph.D., Sonja Entringer, Ph.D., James M. Swanson, Ph.D., and Pathik D. Wadhwa, M.D., Ph.D.

During gestation, the fetal brain develops dramatically as structures and connections form, providing the foundation for all future development. Exposure to maternal stress can sometimes have deleterious effects on the fetus, depending on the cause, timing, duration, and intensity of stress. Fortunately, postnatal interventions, such as a secure parent-infant bond and an enriched environment, can buffer the potential negative consequences. From Cerebrum, our online magazine of ideas.

Design a Brain Experiment Winner

There’s a nice write-up about our “Design a Brain Experiment” competition winner Michaela Ennis in last Friday’s issue of The Record, a New Jersey newspaper. Ennis, a senior at Pingry High school, proposed an examination of the effects of social defeat on anxious behavior, pinpointing the molecular mechanisms for that behavior. She will use her $500 cash prize to further her work on one of Pingry’s independent research projects—cloning human Huntington genes into zebra fish.

This fall, Ennis will begin her freshman year at MIT.

--Ann L. Whitman

Brain Game: Word Search

Let’s be honest, it’s sometimes hard to concentrate on work on Friday afternoons. Your mind starts to wander, thinking about the fun things you’re going to do over the weekend. Well, why not take a quick break and start the fun now!

The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives created a number of original puzzles and games, which are available online, and today seems like a Word Search kind of day. This particular puzzle is from the Top Ten Brain Awareness Week Favorite Puzzles collection.

From the Archives: Mother’s Day

With Mother’s Day just around the corner (put your cards in the mail today!), it’s a good time to revisit what articles from Dana’s archives tell us about mother-child relationships.

Some of the studies highlighted on Dana.org may seem bleak, as they study parenting in situations of abuse and neglect. But they all highlight how important a supportive, caring parent is to a developing child.

ADHD, Multi-Tasking, and Reading

This weekend, more than 900 teachers, researchers, and other education experts met to share what they know about how we learn. At a session of the Learning & the Brain conference titled “The Web-Connected Generation: How Technology Transforms Their Brains, Teaching and Attention,” we heard a lot about multi-user virtual environments, enhanced reality, the myth of multitasking, and individualized web-based learning. But the tech story that most caught my attention was a slightly older one: reading.

Why do many kids with ADHD “suddenly” start to lag in reading comprehension by the fourth grade? They seem to have acquired the basic skills at the same rate and competence as their peers; they recognize and use phonemes, they can recall words at sight. One part of the reason is that we’ve been assuming that once kids master all the basic language skills they need, fluency just comes naturally, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Another is that the act of reading itself is a form of multitasking, and in some ways kids with ADHD have a harder time doing it.