Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Quick. What do Elvis and Einstein have in common? Well, their estates are both making oodles of money from them, long after their deaths. Elvis inclusion on the profitable dead celebs list makes sense, but how did good old Albert find himself along side the king of rock and roll?

Turns out that Einstein’s image is plastered all over a best-selling line of interactive videos for babies and toddlers, Baby Einstein. And if you’re going to use the image and name of the king of relativity, you gotta pay for the privilege.

Thankfully, Albert’s not around to see the current controversy released with a study suggesting watching the Baby Einstein video isn’t without a downside.

Now brain plasticity pioneer Michael Merzenich weighs in on the controversy from a plasticity perspective. As I read it, he takes the University of Washington researchers to task mainly for findings that seem little more than a blinding flash of the obvious - at least from a plasticity perspective.

Brain plasticity is driven by whatever it is that we do. And when we spend a lot of time doing one thing, we sacrifice time for doing something else that might also have a plasticity effect. “Fire together, wire together,” as they say.

It does make sense that a baby or toddler spending a lot of time with interactive visual and movement material might develop in a certain way and not others:

I suspect that they could also EASILY scientifically demonstrate that Baby Einstein graduates are particularly fond of visual media and are even more avid-than-usual video game players on the statistical average than are non-exposed kids. And I suspect that those later years of time spent away from language and social interactions at passive viewing and active video game playing shall exaggerate and widen the limitations in language and social development initially arising through video exposure in infants and toddlers.

But Merzenich adds a refreshing dose of common sense to all this by concluding with that the videos are both good and bad for kids. It just depends on what the parent wants for the kid.

YOU decide, for your kid, if the expected consequences of such heavy infant exposure are contributing to biasing them in what YOU regard as a positive or negative direction. On the whole, for my own children, thinking forward to the consequences of biasing the infant toward being in love with passive viewing and electronic media in later life, I would vote ‘no’. For YOUR kid, that could be the wrong answer.

It’s all relative, I suppose.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, memory, plasticity