Thank you for that nice introduction and thank you all for coming out tonight.
I know it's always hard to leave the family and get out to such things and I
hope I can make you feel like it was a worthwhile experience. You may wonder
what's Mother Lillard doing in this moment sorry business and and I'll tell
you I was kind of skeptical about Montessori around when I finished
college and when I did the assistants infancy training with Lynn when
Margaret was a little two-year-old I felt like you know the best educational
system would probably combine elements of this old Montessori system with other
new things that we know and it's just over the years I am more and more
convinced the more that I study it and I also have to say I've been in Montessori
schools all over the world and this is one of the best but I've seen anywhere
in terms of the engagement that I see in the children and the happiness and the
joy as they're as they're doing their work so you know I you all are fortunate
to have such a school in your community and I really admire the the community
for putting it together the teachers and and all that do that so my plan tonight
is to I'd first tell you a little bit about the study that I'm that I'm doing
here and why I'm doing it here just because this is an opportunity and I
think you'll think it's kind of neat stuff and then I'll talk a little bit
about this study that's just come out and frontiers in psychology I'll talk a
little bit about other research with older children because this focused on
primary and then we'll draw some conclusions so the research questions
that I'm trying to address in the study that I'm doing here are whether
behavioral changes are associated with an epigenetic change specifically
demethylation the oxytocin receptors gene and whether this lines up with
behavior and with teacher observations and then whether that's particularly mo
sorry environment so why in MA sorry well ma no sorry saw that if you
prepared the environment with useful activities that involve the hand working
on service of the mind our self-correcting our challenging
are graduated and difficulty and are interconnected and so on and you said
the children free in this environment where the teacher connects them one by
one to the materials only intervening in unconstructive behaviors that children
start to concentrate in a really deep way that she used to think children
couldn't concentrate either and you know we tended we tend to think that but they
she saw these profound changes as they started to concentrate which she
referred to as normalization and it was it was changes where they become more
empathetic they become kinder they make better decisions that become
precociously intelligent all kinds of interesting changes so this sit back for
a sec so so development is the environment acting on genetic
information that changes the way that that genetic information gets expressed
and this was something that interestingly Montessori saw long long
ago from many years in developmental psychology we've talked about is it
nature or nurture you know is it your genes or is it your environment she saw
early on how interconnected these are biologists have respected this for quite
a while and developmental psychology just in the last 20 years has started to
really appreciate this well Montessori sudden you know there's
the physical program that we have they've sort of genetically set up
physical program of development and then there's the mental program of
development and she said development proceeds well when the physical and the
mental can work together in in concert so normal development happens when the
physical and the mental are growing together in a good environment and she
said deviations come about when somehow that gets disrupted so for example for a
child who's in it who's in a crib and has some will to act but can't because
they're prevented from moving that would lead to a deviation or when adults are
governing children's behavior so much telling them what
do then the child's not free to have their mind in their body work together
and so when the adult then becomes a substitute for the child's will you
start running into problems and I think it's a really really interesting idea
when we think about for example meditation or yoga or real cases of the
body and the mind working together your minds have a tendency to kind of run off
and you know so there ways to kind of pull it back and bring it back to the
body and the practical life activities in Montessori or a prime example of that
and so are the sensorial activities of getting the body and the mind aligned
with with each other so physical deviations Montessori noted you know
Ward's harelips clubfeet mental deviations she said things like lying
disobedience possessiveness some instability of attention gluttony and
even excessive fantasy where things that she thought came about because the
physical and the mental weren't able to move together so she said each time that
such a polarization of attention took place the child began to be completely
transformed to become calmer more intelligent and more expansive
normalization she said is like a psychological cure or return to normal
conditions when the body and the mind can work together she said that a child
who's become normalized who started to concentrate chose obedience that's given
with joy kind of like the internalization of
norms and the good sense kind of the good norms of our culture that we smile
we say hello we get along we you know clean up after ourselves and so on
Schaeffer tzemre pointed out that the term came from anthropology where it
means being a contributing member of society and elsewhere Montessori said
that a child who's normalized as precociously intelligent one has learned
to overcome himself and live in peace and who prefers a disciplined task to
futile idleness okay so there's this interesting concept of normalization
all right and then we can think you know don't be very simplistic about it of two
kinds of minds you might have a mind that's reactive that's always
fight-or-flight ready that sort of does things superficially because it's got to
be ready for the next thing and that's self protective or you might have a mind
that's very calm very concentrated does deep learning is compassionate and there
are different kinds of environments that those kinds of minds might be adapted to
be in so there's a dangerous environment you know you never know where the next
Lions coming from or you know gunfight or whatnot you need that first kind of
mind but if you're in a safe environment beautiful environment then you can
deeply concentrate and learn and so it seems that our minds and our ways of
being are adapted for the environments that we need to be in and part of this
has been shown in a really interesting way recently by work on epigenetics so
epigenetics means the elements that are on top of the gene that are going to
influence how it gets expressed and this is a fairly new research area in biology
and it's been ushered in an important ways by a man named Michael Meany who's
it McGill and many of us think he's going to be a Nobel Prize winner before
long so remember that name so in sum Michael meanies research what got him
down on this epigenetic track was there studying stress responses in in rodents
and they noticed that rats that they handled a lot when they were young have
a much calmer stress response when they get older a much healthier stress
response so so an unhealthy stress response and what you see a lot and say
people who are living in really difficult those dangerous environments
as cortisol is up high and it stays high all day long
but people who've been raised in a safer environment their cortisol will shoot up
when something dangerous happens but their body is able to down regulate it
quickly so that everything's everything's fine
so so these mice that had been in rats as well that had been handled when they
were young have that healthier kind of response and so they're wondering you
know what what could this be well if you think about it when you handle a little
animal and you that's a baby and you put it back in the cage what does the mother
tend to do often goes up and licks them all over the place right so they started
thinking gosh is there something that's going on when after we'd handled those
babies and we put them back in and the mothers engage in this behavior that
leads to this better stress response later and a good mother rat does lick
and groom her pups and also does this kind of hunching over to give them extra
space so they can get to suckle hurt her undersides and if she's been more like
that when they're young they have this healthier stress response
not so good mothers don't do that and they don't get the healthy stress
response we may just wonder where am I going with this research but I promise
we're gonna get there so the first study they they stroked the babies with a
paintbrush instead of taking them out and handling them and putting them back
in they just tried you know what if we stroked them with a paintbrush and and
not put them with their mothers at all and lo and behold they were less
stressed as adults but still they wanted to look at this in a really complete way
so they swapped the babies in utero so that a stress mom who doesn't lick and
groom a lot now had the babies of a mom who licks and grooms a lot and and the
babies of the you know they sweat swapped in both ways and lo and behold
the babies grew up to be like their nurturer as opposed to like their genes
okay so the these behaviors and it's particularly in a period from say like 5
to 8 days after birth there's a critical period during which this stroking needs
to happen well meaning went on to discover the cause of this the
underlying cause through a series of elegant biological experiments and what
they found was that on the gene that is governing
the corticosteroid receptors there is so you remember how the DNA turns into RNA
and replicates itself well when you get a methyl group this chemical on a part
of the gene it will stop the replication of that particular part of the gene and
so what they found was when there are low levels of licking and grooming you
get more methyl groups on the corticosteroid genes causing there to be
fewer of these receptors and that then leads to the the poor stress response
okay so fast-forward then so this was a really fascinating thing to see that
something that happens in the environment when you're young can change
how you are far later by by changing the way that the hormones get taken into
your body so we are looking at the oxytocin receptors eeen and these are
all part of the HPA axis where your hypothalamus is governing stress
responses and much else so the oxytocin receptors eeen is implicated in anxiety
depression ADHD concentration learning memory social behavior autism empathy
compassion social connection many many things and I have a colleague Jess
Connolly who studied starting out prairie voles because they
pair bond for life so they've looked at the oxytocin receptor but she's also
shown that it's implicated in psychopathology social skills social
perception empathy and the like okay so now I hope it's starting to come
together for you I started to wonder is normalization the result of
demethylation of the oxytocin receptors een and it makes sense given all the
array of behaviors that Montessori thinks goes along with children starting
to deeply concentrate so is it the case that children feel safe they're in an
environment where they can deeply concentrate that causes demethylation of
the oxytocin receptors een and leads to this huge array where children aren't
you know nicer more empathic and and so on so that is why we're coming in and
taking the children's looks - and and why am i doing it here
well I always want to start with what I know is a really good Montessori program
I feel like if you go to something that's not a good Montessori program and
you don't see it you don't know if the problem is that it's not happening in
Montessori or just this wasn't a good implementation so I wanted to do this
first here because I feel like this school really gets children into this
state and so in May we came in and we just did broad-scale and we did for two
14 year olds because that's what I had permission to do at the time the UVA you
know they're very very careful because a lot of this comes out of the hospital
and medical research and they have to be so careful with HIPAA laws and
everything so that's why the forms are so crazy but but we had 70 children ages
4 to 14 and it was the case that children has oxytocin receptors in was
more methylated were also considered to be less normalized in teacher
observations and you can see the line there but we had a restricted range
because so many of the children were already considered to be very very well
normalized so now we're going for a younger sample who we think is less
likely to be so 17 months I think we even had a ten year old but generally
we're trying to stop at eight or nine years and we've got teacher observations
but I'm also doing behavioral measures and we're looking at the change across
the school year and should we see what we're expecting to see there then the
next thing will be there's some schools in Washington DC where I can have a
comparison on Montessori sample that lost a lottery to to get in and just to
show you what the saliva kits look like this and B what they had to spit in me
but now we just take some q-tips and put them in and they absorb some of the
saliva and then I cut them into this little dish and then little behavioral
tests like you drop things and and see if the children quickly come to help
pick them up or whether they just kind of look at you so so those are the sorts
of things that we're doing and I thank you all so so very much for letting us
see if this has support because if it does it's going to be just really
founding and astonishing that a school program could lead to a biological
change i mean i think i think it'll be a PNAS or a science paper if it happens
you
For more infomation >> Sebastián Yatra - SUTRA
For more infomation >> I'm already dead - unknxwn. [Subtitulos/Lyrics - English/Español] - Duration: 1:57. 
For more infomation >> Volunteers try to get homeless count on a cold night - Duration: 1:55. 
For more infomation >> IM GONNA GETCHA GOOD! - (teksty/lyrics/songtexte/info) Sala weselna EDEN PGKiM - Duration: 3:57. 
For more infomation >> 🔴 Sea of thieves - closed beta | livestream - Duration: 2:53:34. 
For more infomation >> This is the way(VR Chat) - Duration: 6:32. 
For more infomation >> Blues wedrowca . Tekst Włodek Jędrzejczak muzyka Adam Urbaniak .Gra Adam Urbaniak Band . - Duration: 5:31. 
For more infomation >> 실물과 가깝게 찍힌 아이돌 무보정 사진.jpg - Duration: 1:52. 
For more infomation >> 裝卸車頂外罩 VW T6 California Ocean Roof Cover - Duration: 6:04. 
For more infomation >> O que é a prímula e quais são seus benefícios? - Duration: 11:41. 
For more infomation >> Mensagem de Nossa Senhora de Anguera, 23/01/2018 - Duration: 1:57. 
For more infomation >> 5 remédios naturais para acalmar o ardor ao urinar - Duration: 10:20. 
For more infomation >> Claudemir Lima poesias Só o teu amor me completa ( Legendado) - Duration: 2:40. 
For more infomation >> DENY - El Enemigo (Audio) - Duration: 3:28. 
For more infomation >> How To Reach Your Full Potential | Tom O'neil - Duration: 5:14. 
For more infomation >> Depressão Parte 1 - Causas da Depressão - Duration: 9:59. 
For more infomation >> ジャングルをあるこう | こどものうた | Super Simple 日本語 - Duration: 3:32. 
For more infomation >> NÃO FAÇA CIRURGIA! EXPULSE Até a Ultima PEDRA NOS RINS Com Apenas Meio Copo Dessa Bebida - Duration: 3:12. 
For more infomation >> BIMOUD - DIECISIETE [ Inedito 2015 ] - Duration: 4:13. 
For more infomation >> A Lista de Convidados | Bem Casados.TV - Duration: 12:06. 
For more infomation >> Roblox - Desastres Naturais - Duration: 7:26. 
No comments:
Post a Comment