Practice Makes Myelinated Perfect
We’ve all heard the expression, “Practice makes perfect.” In fact, most of us are guilty of repeating that old bromide, typically to encourage some extremely imperfect activity. Nonetheless, this hoary oyster holds within a pearl of pure truth. Neuroscience tells us that practice makes perfect because of myelination. Our incredible brains never stop changing, which can be a bad thing depending on how we invest or squander our time. As they say, you are what you do, thanks to myelination. Everything we think, say, or do involves the firing of long chains of neurons in our brains. Myelin is an insulating tissue that forms a layer or sheath around the axon of a neuron. Apparently, myelin develops along neural pathways that fire over and over, and its function is to increase the speed of neural impulses along these pathways. In essence, the more we perform a certain task, the faster…
What Does Neurodivergent Mean?
While American culture celebrates individual differences and promotes diversity, many of our societal systems struggle with anyone who deviates too far from an accepted norm. This can certainly be the case in school; the entire model of group instruction depends on cohorts that learn the same material in the same way at the same pace. Obviously, not every child fits this mold. Advancing understanding of the way humans think and learn has changed our dialogue around learning disabilities. Instead of framing challenges as disorders, we now look at divergence. Sociologist Judy Singer coined the term neurodiversity to describe “the limitless variability of human cognition and the uniqueness of each human mind.” Assuming that someone is disabled because he doesn’t learn the way his classmates does represents outdated beliefs that ignore what we’ve always accepted about people: disadvantages in some areas generally accompany advantages in other areas. Thus, neurodivergent simply describes…