Working in Movement

It's no secret that most fine motor skills are harder to learn as an adult than as a child. Professional golfers (those on tour and those who teach at local courses), for example, almost always indicate that they first picked up a golf club when they were very young, and they were good at it pretty much from the start. The same holds true for tennis, baseball, basketball, horseshoes, whatever. I've always said the golf teacher I want is the hapless hacker who never broke 100 and then suddenly figured it out well enough to shoot par on a regular basis. That probably ain't going to happen. In fact, there are those who say that it can't happen.

No one was born knowing how to hit a golf ball, or much of anything else for that matter. At some point, everything is learned by the developing baby, child or adult. But is this so called developmental period a set sequence or is it just based on when the learning occurs? There have (and are) theories on both sides. And now there is a kind of hybrid called the critical windows theory of development. Its basic premise, spelled out in We Can Build Better Brains, holds the existence of critical windows -- times during which specific parts of the brain are the most ready to be altered and learn from experience. It's not a preordained sequence unfolding, or an accumulation of learning: the nervous system learns much more readily at certain stages of it's wiring than at others. For example, it's easier to learn a second or third language as a child than as an adult.

The article mostly concentrates on the work of Max Cynader, director of the Brain Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Cynader, both research and entrepreneur, hopes to develop the research and make money from its implications. He talks of using MRI scans in school rooms to direct individual student's learning activity according to which of their critical windows are more open at the time. My bet would be on the recess window, but that would probably take more research ( ;

One interesting area looks into applying the critical windows idea on dyslexia. Cynader sees dyslexia as a critical window problem-- the brain cells needed to process rapidly changing sights and sounds may have lost the competition to build these connections in the brain when they are needed at a critical stage of development. According to the article:

There is some evidence he may be right: American researchers have found that those cells don't seem to function as well in dyslexic patients, which may be why their brains fail to receive key information when they read.

Working with others, Dr. Cynader's goal is to find a test to identify kids at risk for dyslexia when they are babies or toddlers. Researchers in Utah are zeroing in on a gene that may be linked to the condition in half of patients who get it. Others are working on hearing and sight tests that could detect the disorder early.

The idea would be to develop a series of exercises that would strengthen the naturally weak part of their visual and auditory systems.

Cynader also cites the critical role of plasticity in all this:

Among all their other potentials, he says, critical windows offer a unique opportunity to repair damage: "If things go wrong during a critical period, you can make a mess. But if you want to fix things, the best time to fix things is a critical period, when there is still a lot of plasticity."

Well, maybe. Only time and much more research will tell. And learning disabilities seems a great place to aim for in applying this stuff.

But in the meantime, there is the problem of motor skills like golf and tennis. Can you really develop them well as an adult? To quote from the article:

Scientists have not yet described the critical windows for complex motor skills, such as skiing or biking, or even throwing and catching a ball like Liam, 7. But it's clearly before adulthood: It is usually obvious when someone has begun playing a sport in childhood or learned later in life.

Of course, we can all think of people who can pick up any skill, even as they age. So what's really at work in those cases?