Children whose minds wander 'have sharper brains'

Submitted by anthony on Sat, 2012-03-17 16:32

Article here. Unfortunately children are often medicated for such behavior. Excerpt:

'A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.

Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences.

During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering.

At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.

Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.'

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Comments

You guessed it! Basically, drugging children (most of the time, boys) is impeding their brains' natural growth and development pattern. I agree, it makes life easier on the teachers and allows "less active students" more peace and quiet to focus on school work. But it leaves the boys drugged and for many of them, no better off in terms of learning new things in a classroom setting.

If they are lucky, such boys will overcome this experience and go on to develop the coveted "good study habits" that will make everyone just so proud of them. But in the mean time, they are on their own, and no guarantees. Contrast this with how girls are treated in schools and you see the glaring double-standard-- Girls: Nothing less. Boys: Nothing more.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2012-03-17 17:32