 What I'm going to do is to I'm going to speak for a while then Robin's going to speak and then I'll finish up So that's some of you heard us speak before and you might be saying to yourself not those two again We've heard it all but we've got a different Presentation you'll be happy to know and so there will be an exam on this material at the end of the session okay One key concept that we've not emphasized in previous presentations has been the Importance of the prefrontal cortex and we heard a little about Introduction about a second ago, but we want to focus on this and its importance in education So two questions. What is the prefrontal cortex and why does it matter if you think about the word prefrontal? What would that mean? It would mean in front of front, which would mean it's out here somewhere Is that really dumb term? It's not exactly there All mammals Have a region in the front of the brains up here that acts to support cognitive functions necessary to coordinate Behavior in time an example of this in humans would be autograph Biographical memory we have a memory of what happened when we were in grade three and what happened when we were In our early 20s and we have some concept of what will happen in the future This is the prefrontal cortex the kinds of functions that are in there on your slide things like imagination social interaction and so on and I see that the slides here change, but the slides there didn't Not my problem Where am I aiming this at oh back over there, okay Now you can see what it says And these these functions are often called executive functions and Robin will talk some someone about the importance of training children Both in kindergarten and later in executive functions. This is an interesting problem because they don't change together Okay, take note So the prefrontal cortex is this oh and is there a point around here? Yes, but where would I point Not going to work. Okay. If you look at the colored area at the front you can see Zones that have numbers on them the brain doesn't come that way But not amuse to put them on there and the stuff that's the prefrontal cortex really has two parts It has a part up here the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and stuff behind your eyes Which is the orbital prefrontal cortex and if you take that out. It's called a lobotomy So what we're interested in is the development of this stuff So the answers are Prefrontal cortex is found in all mammals as I said, but it's very late to develop This is important because it means that it's influenced by developmental experiences that actually begin in utero and They're still going on We used to think that the prefrontal cortex if you look at books that are probably sort of really old books like 1995 we're going to say Maybe age 20 we now know that Prefrontal development continues well into the 30s, but there are two peak times However, one is an early childhood and one is during puberty The effect of this long developmental period is that virtually every serious mental health issue that people have Involves some dysfunction of the prefrontal region of the brain So let's look at brain development This is an amazing thing the brain that we have it's got at least 80 billion brain cells neurons and each of those Has about 15,000 connections so something in the order of 10 to the 14th Connections you could not have a blueprint of such an amazing Piece of work you can have a blueprint in principle of a kidney or of a heart They're fairly simple in structure, but the brain is not so what you have to do is you have to have a different strategy And the strategy that mother nature designed is let's start with his big hunk of tissue and get rid of half of it And what we're going to do is we're going to have the brain so it adapts to whatever environment you're in So if you're living in a new Vic what's going to be needed in that brain is different than what's going to be needed in Manhattan and in fact the brains are quite different of people who are raised in those kinds of different Locations so if you look at the stages of brain development You have to think about brain development each cell is being an individual so the cells are born We have a nursery in the brain and you still have it. I hope if you don't you've got a problem So we've got this nursery cells are born Then they have to leave home and they have to migrate to where they're going to be when they grow up In contrast to our kids who stay around these ones leave Then the cells differentiate into something they mature they grow connections And then we start getting rid of them and when it's getting rid of them It turns out to be really important for early childhood education So if we look at this Nice image here. You can see the cross sections through the fetal brain. You can see in that Panel second from the left the nursery which is around the ventricles the tubes of water in your brain The cells are going to migrate from that nursery on little roads and they're going to end up what they're supposed to be Now they must go to the right region and they must go to the right layer in the brain You can see here cells at birth are quite simple and as you look from left to right the cells are getting more and more complicated and They're sculpted actively and it says here for 20 plus years and it's way more than 20 years If I asked each one of you to think back and say to yourself when was it that I became who I am There's going to be a sex difference men are going to be a little later But I think that for most people it's going to be after age 25 that they can say I haven't changed a whole lot Since then certainly. I'm nothing like I was when I was 20 And I knew her and she was 20 and neither she I'm not going to say if it's good or bad. It's just a thing And I think I probably haven't changed much since I Turned 30 and she knew me then and she can tell you whether or not that's the case The point is it's a long prolonged period Now if we look here What you can see it says striate visual cortex and prefrontal cortex There's two lines so if you look at the far left it says conception and we're looking at the number of connections in in the Different regions of the brain if we go towards birth you can see they're both climbing so connections are being formed prenatally We're climbing and for the visual cortex the peak is around one year So now you have the most connections you're ever going to have in that region of the brain for the prefrontal cortex This this drawing it turns out as a bit out of date It looks like it's about age two, but in fact a study that We read just this week that just came out Suggests that in the prefrontal cortex the peak may not be until at least age five or six So it's actually quite late, which means when kins are in kindergarten. They're still developing cells In connections in the prefrontal cortex then there's a period of where nothing seems to happen And then you start getting rid of them So if you just look at the prefrontal cortex you start losing connections just before puberty So in girls, let's say around age 10 boys probably a year later around age 11 and at the peak of Synaptic loss children are losing 100,000 connections per second That's a lot of connections. So 100,000 gone 100,000 gone 100,000 gone and if you think of 14-year-old girls You can't wait for them to lose a lot To turn into people you'd want to be around and so what happens is during this puberty time and going until late teens There's a huge drop or that continues right into the 30s to some of this prolonged effect So what's happening is these connections that are being formed early on that you can see in early childhood and then Deleted beginning in late juvenile and into pubescence These connections are being Formed and changed by what I'm going to call chisels. Those chisels are experiences that you have in your life So whether they're hormones gonadal hormones stress hormones or teacher-parent interactions or a teacher child interactions parent child interactions peer-to-peer interactions and whatnot Exposure to all kinds of stuff as you'll see now if you take kids and you throw them in a MRI and You bribe them to be still the earliest you can do this is around age five Earlier than that you can take a three-year-old and say don't move and we'll be good to you. You're right They've got to sit still for about half an hour So that's not going to happen, but you can see that I hope you can see the colors and you can see the colors go from Yellow and red to blue the bluer the color the thinner the cerebral cortex is so if you look at the pictures on the on the left you can see that it's very Red and and yellow and green and as you go towards age 20 It's getting bluer and bluer and note that the pattern of blueness goes from back to front so it's the front That's the latest in It's the front that's the latest in in developing and this picture shows age 20 and probably in terms of cortical thickness That's about as far as you would go now People are going to say you're saying that less brain is better and the answers. Yeah, it is and so if we If we look here The little dots reflect regions of the left hemisphere that are inversely correlated with vocabulary Skills so that means the thinner that cortex is the better your vocabulary will be It's counterintuitive. So you can see there is a whole wide range of regions In which we see decreasing cortical thickness and increasing vocabulary. What happens if that doesn't happen? Well, your vocabulary is no good. So what we had you're not that's sorry. That's a wrong term vocabulary is less good Than those who have thinner cortex. So we've got this strange strange event happening here All right, so what are some of the factors that are going going to influence prefrontal development? Well, there's a whole bunch of factors and I'm not going to go into any detail on on most of these but you'll get a flavor from them So there's five different types of factors that we can identify Easily, there are others as well. You can see what they are sensory motor experience. I'll explain that in a second early stress Psychoactive drugs and by psychoactive drugs I'm including prescription drugs that mum might have taken or non prescription drugs that mum might have taken or In both cases dad might have taken before conception And we can look also at the drugs that that we encounter postnatally in the whole range, obviously parent-infant relationships and peer relationships So if we one example that we can look at in terms of sensory motor experience is tactile stimulation This is a powerful event and here's some examples of tactile stimulation in our world in the kangaroo Roo world and in the laboratory rat world so we can see in the bottom Left we've got a little brush and we're going to tactically stimulate this baby rat for 15 minutes three times a day This the idea of these experiments came from the fact that these kinds of treatments are used in in premature Infants in hospitals and they actually grow faster and released from hospitals sooner And it turns out that just doing this to these little rats We originally did this with a little brush now we use a swifter because you can do a whole bunch at once You can line them all up and just And when I say we I don't mean me I mean undergraduates like to do this and so Here sign up pet rats So if you do this and then you wait till they grow up don't do anything else to them wait till they grow up What you find is that they have superior cognitive skills They have superior motor skills and if you look at the structure of their brain one of the biggest changes is in the structure of Cells in the prefrontal cortex we see modifications of the neural networks in prefrontal cortex in response to this tactile stimulation It's a powerful Simulation so then we think about it you say well that's interesting in rats. What does it happen in people? Well, there's two examples there There's the maternal massage which is prenatal and then we have the kangaroo care with the dad holding the interim postnatal So the skin-to-skin contact it turns out to be really important the tactile Contact is truly important. We've done lots of research trying to figure out why this happens And we can give you molecular explanations, but they don't matter right now all that matters is this is important Second one is early stress. It's an example of the opposite kind of effect early stressors in in humans might be the mums Got all kinds of worries and after all she's having a baby. That's got worries They don't have enough money. Maybe there's arguments all kinds of somebody loses a job and so on and so on So if we look at the effect of early stress on brain development, it turns out it even if it's fairly mild stress We have profound experience Experiences that can actually be seen in middle age in adulthood So what happens? Well, we have smaller brains We have larger adrenal glands because the adrenal glands are responding to the stress obviously and we see the biggest changes are Infrontal of development and you can see on those two Photographs on the bottom two different regions and so in the rat We're looking at those two prefrontal regions the one up here and the one behind the eyes And you can see in each of those little panels that the picture on the right is simpler That is there are fewer little stubby things on the on that cell than the one on the left those represent Synaptic zones so places of contact and so what you've seen here or you can see here is a decrease of about 25 to 40 percent In the number of connections now. This isn't an adult animal whose mum was stressed and Then the stress stopped and then the infants were born We let them grow up and we look in their brain to huge effect on prefrontal development one of the effects of this is they don't play normally and they have abnormal cognitive and Motor behaviors exactly the opposite of the tactile stimulation So one of the treatments obviously for early stress might be tactile stimulation of the mums So as Brian mentioned Our early life can set the stage for how stress can affect our brains and that early life actually extends from research We've recently done into the prenatal period and I've just completed some studies with Brian and Postdoc in our lab Bruchel Machacic and what we've discovered is that it even extends into the preconception period So things that happen before you conceive your child can actually affect their brain development And that seems to be particularly true for things like stress So when you have kids coming into the classroom grade one It's important to understand that they come with the background of how their brains have been developed and in part how they have Been tuned in to stress processes as a result of the experiences that they've had So they can be classified by both their behavioral and physiological responses Some kids are very reactive in classroom environments other kids are not so you all any of you who've had these classroom experiences with little kids Understand that some kids are very quiet and don't interact a great deal other kids are highly reactive and have lots to say and and really sort of Have no fears about the things that are going on in the classroom And it turns out that those two styles Require different kinds of teaching in order to optimize their development So and there's good evidence to show that how the teacher interacts with kids in grade one Independent of how of how these children are parented have effects on how well they do in grade seven both in mental health And as far as their academic performances go so children who don't have high stress Reactivity and have a relationship with their teacher are actually more tuned into absence of conflict What they don't want to have is a conflict with the teacher because if they have conflict They tend to do worse as they get into grade seven those kids that are highly reactive Work better with strong Relationship with the teacher they want teacher closeness and if there's an absence of teacher closeness in these children That's what predicts More of failure in grade seven as far as their mental health processes go So you're not always dealing with the same thing when you have kids coming in and stress actually changes the way we react to our environment and Keeping that in mind that should change your teaching strategies for these kids So a classroom that's very stable is is much better for a child who who is non-reactive who likes Consistency who is a more timid or shy yet a chaotic classroom can work very well for children Who are reactive because they get in there and actually participate at all levels of the planned activities So success in school actually requires that your executive function those functions that are a Component of how the prefrontal cortex actually makes a difference in our lives Those are all fundamental as far as having success in school And I've listed four and they're slightly different than the ones Brian gave you examples of creativity flexibility self-control and discipline and these qualities are actually if you check Do test these qualities in kids kids that have better developed executive function Have better school readiness and this is a better predictor of their school readiness than their IQ So it is important to understand that we need to develop executive function so that children will actually Come forward and and be able to do better in school as a result of that development So if we look at children between the ages of three and seven Do I still move this here? Oh, okay Okay We're on Self-control it's back for Yeah, yeah, just Okay So children who have worse self-control when they're tested a even as early as age three Tend to have more problems with stress They are more lonely and they're less physically fit than kids who have better self-control They have worse health outcomes They earn less as adults and they commit more crimes 30 years later after they've been tested So clearly there is some real advantage in making sure that kids have good executive function And if that was the goal of our education system, then we would actually see all kinds of benefits as a nation it has been shown by by economists and one is just recently published by Moffat at all in proceeding of National Academy of Science in 2011 that even very small Improvements in executive function function and kids can translate to later health improvements wealth improvements and lower crime for a nation So how do we improve executive function? There is a lovely review that Adele Diamond has just done on executive function and schooling and she has Listed all sorts of activities that have been shown to improve executive function one of the activities that came up is computerized training or a hybrid computer and Non-computer games and an example of that is a game called Cog Ed Now there's a few of these different kinds of games and many of them are designed to with algorithms Work at the level that the child is working at and if they need remediation in some areas It changes the program on the fly to work on those areas. So it's really quite exciting and There are The problem with this is it works better in older children than younger children So this works really well for children about ages 8 to 11 But if we're talking about children in kindergarten pre-kindergarten or in those very early years in school They tend not to be as optimal for these children's development Something that I think is very exciting is it has now been shown that aerobic exercise Aerobic exercise can improve working memory function in kids and it improves it in a way that This is not just a little aerobic exercise They require at least 40 minutes of aerobic exercise a day in order to show these improvements and working memory and working memory As you know as a teacher is really important to keep kids on task help them to understand and make decisions about the The tasks that they're engaging in so I think these kinds of findings are very exciting now sports has not been Well researched, but it looks as though if this aerobic activity works aerobic exercise that there is good Possibilities that in organized sports to a certain degree can even work possibly better for some of these children Something that I found very interesting is the summary on martial arts mindfulness practices things like yoga and the classroom And it turns out again that martial arts things like taekwondo Can really improve executive function in kids. It helps develop the prefrontal cortex Part of that whole experience is not just the physical moves and the training But it is thinking about who I am where I am where am I going and how do I get there? They are constantly reminding children who are taking these programs that these are the questions They have to bear in mind while they're going through the process of learning taekwondo In an interesting example children are either given taekwondo training or martial arts the the sort of modern martial arts training and this was done in kids who had problems in adolescence The kids who were given taekwondo training actually resolved their problems and had less externalizing behaviors and did better in school children who were giving the modern martial arts were more aggressive and did worse So they didn't have that mindful mindfulness component in the modern martial arts And that seems to be key in mediating prefrontal cortex development and getting those executive functions on board Classroom curricula it turns out can also make a difference in prefrontal cortex function And I've just included an example here of something that is akin to the Wisconsin Cards learning task That has been around for many years and helps helps determine Executive function in the prefrontal cortex in adults and this has been designed to work with children and in this case The child is asked to sort cards that either have blue figures or red figures on them according to color and the blue The figures are either rabbits or boats and so there's categorization in two dimensions There's the color dimension and what the item is and by having them switch their strategies You can actually develop Executive function in the prefrontal cortex because they have to now know to inhibit their response to sorting in color and switch it now to sorting by shape and That that turns to work out very well, but if you're looking for help with behavioral Self-control they this kind of thing doesn't really generalize too well So it really works well for the thing that you're training on but it doesn't generalize so well to other functions of the prefrontal cortex So I've just included a few programs that that I've come across that do Are designed to enhance executive function and tools of the mind many of you have probably heard of and it's based on the Vigosity kind of reasoning that you really have to work with Getting children to understand Expectations understand self-control and things like that and actually has been shown now that it does develop executive function in these kids Montessori practices seem also to develop executive function and something called paths, which is promoting alternative thinking strategies seems to develop these Executive functions another program the Chicago school readiness program is an is another program that has been shown Can develop these functions if you look at all of these programs and try to find common themes What they have in common is they don't expect little kids to sit for too long Because that is really asking the impossible of young children But a key thing in what the strategy is here is they reduce stress in the classroom They really allow the child to feel comfortable enough that they can focus now on cultivating Joy about the experiences that they're having pride in what they've done and also Social bonding and self-confidence and these are key things that will actually help continue to develop those executive functions And make kids successful throughout their lives So a summary of the findings of these studies children with the poorest Executive functions stand to gain the most So if you have highly reactive kids coming into a grade one classroom, and they're not getting the right One-to-one relationship interaction with the teacher teacher closeness they can be set on a stage for failure later on in life and These very same kids if given that closeness that teacher Relationship can do the best So you really have the child who's coming in with a reactive temperament Who is either going to flourish or fail as a result of those very early years in schooling? You really have to put children in a demanding situation in order to see the differences in their executive function if you have a chaotic classroom kids who have better executive function are going to learn more because they they can Focus in on what it is that they're supposed to be doing and manage to get through the task without being interrupted or distracted by others Activities so you really see larger differences in those most demanding executive function measures And if you don't challenge executive function, they don't continue to improve So if you have achieved a level of self-control in self inhibition if you don't continue to challenge children to extend that that time before they're going to engage in some activity and One of the tests they use sometimes is a very appealing candy like a rollo and they place it in front of children and say Don't eat it yet. I'll tell you when it's time and some kids can't Can't inhibit themselves from reading. I'm not sure if I could either if it was a rollo, but But other children will learn that if they wait the reward is a higher stakes kind of reward And so it's worthwhile for them to hold off on on satisfying that urge The executives functions do transfer to a certain degree, but the transfer is generally narrow and from what I've read It looks like some of the best transfer is through exercise So now we're going to step back again and talk a little bit about brain plasticity so now you've heard that Early life is very important in setting the stage for later learning and how does this happen? It turns out that our experiences are actually changing the physical nature of our brain And when we have brain changes we can see behavioral changes if you change behavior You initiate changes in the brain and both of these things are modulated by our environment Just like those early classrooms not all brain plasticity is positive And if you think about habits you can understand that some brain plasticity can actually be quite negative But think back to the stress example Sometimes kids have early experiences that set them up for being highly reactive highly stressed under certain situations And that can be detrimental if they're not given the right kind of environment in which to grow So I'm just harkening you back to the nature and nurture debate, which is no longer debate Environment clearly does leave its mark on our genome and it can modulate future gene expression and sometimes heritable fashion So you may not just be doing something for the children in your classroom You may be doing something for their children by giving them the right kinds of positive experiences I've just read studies because I'm interested in this paternal component preconception component and how much that influences brain development that in some cases a single intense acute exposure to something like alcohol Preconception can set the stage for changes in the way the brain is going to develop and how that child could ultimately turn out Just a single event So the study of how environment leaves its footprint on the genome is what we call Epigenetics and it's something that Brian and I have been studying in intense detail in the past few years So again an epigenetic change is a change in gene expression. That's often mediated by environmental influences What's interesting about this is it remains stable between cell divisions? So that means is the cell divides that epigenetic information is retained and that is how you can pass this information on to future generations There's clearly a good evidence now that shows that people who live through the Dutch famine have an altered Genome and that has been transferred through the children and their grandchildren and has changed the metabolic Processes in their grandchildren and these children have more health problems as a result of what their grandparents experienced And it gives us cause for consideration about how important positive experiences are in our young environment and Trying to make sure that children have access to as many of those positive kinds of experiences as they possibly can So I just wanted to illustrate how this epigenetic code is maintained on the DNA this is a strand of DNA and You can see there are these little me groups on it Those are methyl groups which is a chemical substitution and the methyl groups will actually help decide whether or not a gene is Expressed or not? So if there is a methyl group on the DNA it can prevent a gene being expressed a Protein being made which will change the nature of the person who is carrying these methylation changes on their genome Okay, so just a review of that. There is an Enzyme called RNA polymerase that reads our DNA and as a result of having access to that information can make protein if There is a methyl group at the promoter site It can't access the DNA and as a result of that it cannot read that gene So when you have hyper methylation of the genome There is no access to information For proteins to be made in your body and the work that Brian talked about earlier the prenatal stress clearly hyper methylates our genome So we're not having access to making the same kinds of proteins as kids who have not had that adverse early experience. I Also want to point out about relationships that there are quite fundamentally different Relationships that we develop with our parenting and if you think about this Males and females even in the early childhood education domain do react to children differently So I'm talking about moms and dads But this could be related to grandparents uncles and also early child care providers and early child educators So we'll examine some of the differences Play styles is quite different between men and women men do more of the rough and tumble play chase the kids around the house Throw them around wrestle with them in the living room then do mothers I mean, it's really quite obvious that there's a huge sex difference here They allow the children to access their body more explore their body more. They'll climb on dads They'll be on their shoulders. They'll dads will give them rides on on their back And mothers tend not to do that so much although there is definitely overlap in these these styles and the play is Unpredictable and this is what little kids love about playing with their dads or uncles or grandpas or our early childhood male Care providers because they don't know what's coming next. They can't figure it out women unfortunately are highly predictable in their play Men actually fathers when they're playing with their kids are actually there for their kids 40% of the time that they spend with your kids is an interactive play now Let's just look at the mother end of things women like to color at the table draw read to their children They don't permit too much physical contact and there is some thought that that might be because the baby has Access to your body for the first nine months of life and after that you feel like that's enough and They certainly do play in a predictable fashion they only spend about 22% of the time that they are spending with their kids in interactive play So just examples of the kinds of things that men or fathers do tag wrestling lots of physical contact Mothers coloring drawing board games are nice, especially if you can get your children to clean them up after and then little contact Discipline styles also vary between men and women and part of the reason that these things do vary is because we have differing sex hormones And they change our brain in different ways and so our solution to problems are different men versus women So men tend to use a quick disciplinary kind of style and trying to get whatever wasn't was had gone wrong Get it over with quick and let's move forward Women will always try to soften the blow they'll want to encourage their children to think about it It takes a it's there's quite a long expansive time that is required for women to help their children resolve problems That that doesn't seem to happen with men. They want immediate results and they want to move on As far as encouragement styles and I've gone back to dads and mums is the heading here because you can see at The picture of the father encouraging his child to explore this peak If that wasn't the father I think there'd be big issues with the family if they saw what early care providers might be doing with their children on a field trip So they do encourage their kids to take risks They tend not to coddle and they want the child to stretch their limits cheerleader style of encouragement moms encourage kids to be safe They want to be sure that the child is secure and comfortable at the level of the activity that they're engaging in and We call that sort of moral lifeguard style of encouragement But clearly both of these styles are important to fully develop the prefrontal cortex in a child If it's only exposed to one of the forms of all of these things They tend to have a very narrow perspective on how to deal with life if they have access to both views They actually have a better and more well-rounded perspective on how to deal with life Now I want to take you to a lab study and this is a lab study with daygoos and aren't they so cute They are tiny while the rodents that grow to be about the size of a small guinea pig And what's interesting about this type of rodent is they have Biparental care of their young so both mothers and fathers participate in raising the babies in this type of a rodent family In most rodent families the mother is responsible for early nurturing and childcare so to speak So I want to talk about a father attachment But first I want to draw your attention to the bottom panel of this slide Because this is the daygoos again and this is in their frontal cortex if you take father out of the situation And you have a single mother raising the children Note that the the dendrite is bearing less of the little bumps or dendritic spines with father gone Than with father there so having that father experience is enriching Frontal cortex development enriching the connections and enriching the child and let's now slip back to humans It turns out that if you look at vocabulary, it's father vocabulary Not mother that predicts kids literacy skills even though dad speaks fewer words to their children It's their vocabulary. That's a better predictor of how well kids will do with literacy than mothers If father is strongly attached they have stronger into the kids will have stronger interpersonal relationship skills There tend to be as children grow up in the adolescent years fewer teen pregnancies less drug use less likely to join gangs more likely to finish high school if there's strong father attachment and Strong mother attachment predicts none of these things and I know as a mother I felt kind of devastated when I read this paper thinking that are you kidding me? It's their dad that's really going to make a difference as far as a lot of these behavioral indicators go But that's what the research shows so back to the issue of prefrontal plasticity the Question we can ask here is why I have what you've just heard. Why is it important? And one of the reasons is that social hierarchies that we fall into as adults predict our health So the social your position in the social hierarchy your social economic status is going to predict your physical and mental health in your mid 50s But it turns out it's also true in kindergarten You can actually see work by Tom Boyce at the University of British Columbia has shown that if you look at children playing That they when they're playing in classrooms and he was looking in kindergarten's they actually establish hierarchies They're children who are involved and they're children who are not involved and if you follow these children What you can find is the children who are not involved the children who are not playing and are at the bottom of the hierarchies Do less well. They don't really flourish where very well Well, can we figure out why that might be is there something in the animal studies? We can we can do and so we know our colleague Sergio Pellis who normally is on our dog and pony show But couldn't be here today because he had to be in South Carolina a little warmer looking at monkeys All mammals have play behavior and there are rules and so these are two rats playing if you're a rat There are rules if you're a cat there are rules if you're a rat One rule is my job is to try and nuzzle the nape of your neck. That's what I'm going to try to do that's what kittens do too and The other rats going to say no, you don't my job is to prevent it. And so what you get is this sort of Rolling around is one tries to get to the back of the other This is not play fighting if you're fighting with a rat the last thing you want to do is to have your mouth anywhere near Their mouth what you want to do is have your mouth near their butt because there's no teeth there So that's a totally different kind of behavior, but there's other rules I get to do it then you get to do it if you don't if they don't trade back and forth Then there's problems and there's a variety of other rules the key question We're going to ask here is what is all this play behavior doing to the brain is it important for brain development? And it turns out it is The amount of play that the rats engage in Affects the complexity of cells in the prefrontal cortex So the we can manipulate the amount of play by giving in various numbers of play partners like zero versus four or ten or whatever And so the more play partners there are the more play there is Now why is this important? Well, these cells are being changed these neural networks are being changed by this play behavior But not only that if we look at animals who during the juvenile years got lots of play Or not very much play and we look at them as adults It turns out that the individuals who had more play have a more flexible brain That is the brain is more likely to respond to experiences animals that had no play that they lived only with adults And adult rats won't play with infant rats or juvenile rats They they they'll interact with them. They won't play Those animals are really unresponsive to things in their environment when they're later Examined this was a real surprise to us and it's led us to now go back and say exactly what's going on How are the methylation changes? leading to this Okay, so to conclude Brain development is prolonged. It's especially in the prefrontal cortex and executive function domain It's profoundly expected by experience and the Breadth of those experience we've only touched on there's lots of other experiences virtually any experience you have is going to affect prefrontal development This interaction of nature and nurture and I want to give an example here from Don Hebb He was once asked what's more important nature and nurture and his response was what's more important to the area of a Rectangle the width of the or the length You can't there isn't any answer to that So this nature and nurture interaction predicts success in school its success In lifetime and and health throughout the rest of your life and we'll stop there