Dana Foundation Blog

Off Broadway Play Tackles Football Concussions

Tim Cain plays a researcher who stresses the damaging effects of football on the brain. (Credit: Gerry Goodstein)

Many sports fans would argue that football is America’s new pastime. Some college football stadiums hold over 100,000 fans, the Super Bowl attracts a television audience of about a third of the nation, and media coverage of the National Football League is overwhelming. With such widespread popularity it’s surprising that a degree of uncertainty surrounds the future of the sport that so many live and die for. However, it is the fact that football players may literally die because of their participation that the sport is in flux. On Wednesday night, I attended Headstrong at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, a play that embodies the struggle between love for football and the danger of playing it.

I Am Science

I was fascinated to find out my co-worker Caitlin earned her undergraduate degree in neuroscience. Until then, I didn’t even know neuroscience was a major and never considered how people got into the field. Some of my questions were answered on Tuesday evening at the “I Am Science” event at The Bell House in Brooklyn, N.Y. The event was part of The Story Collider series, which brings people in the field of science together to illustrate science’s impact on our daily lives. It was the second anniversary of this event. (Tweets related to the event can be found by searching for the hashtag #IAmScience.)

Joe LeDoux, middle, and the rest of The Amygdaloids, on stage at the I Am Science event.

 

Secret Science Club Celebrates Ignorance

The secret is out about the Secret Science Club, and probably has been since at least January when The New York Times featured it in an article about educational events in bars around the city. A few hundred people packed the room at the Bell House in Brooklyn, sipping on a house cocktail named WTF?! in honor of the evening’s event,“Ignorance: A Whiff of the Unkown.”

Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, author of the book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, was on hand to discuss the importance of questioning and examining what we don’t know to advance science research. Firestein explained that many people perceive science as mass fact memorization, but in reality it’s more exciting to talk about what we don’t yet know. He took that notion, and in 2006 created an entire course for college seniors called “Ignorance,” which he teaches at Columbia University.

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

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.