[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Damage to Prefrontal Cortex Compensated by Intact Areas; 'Phantom' Images Stored in Flexible Network Throughout Brain
ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2010) — Brain research over the past 30 years has shown that if a part of the brain controlling movement or sensation or language is lost because of a stroke or injury, other parts of the brain can take over the lost function -- often as well as the region that was lost.

New research at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that this holds true for memory and attention as well, though -- at least for memory -- the intact brain helps out only when needed and conducts business as usual when it's not.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[SIZE="5"][COLOR="DarkGreen"]These results support the hypothesis that memory is not stored in one place, but rather, is distributed in many regions of the brain, which means that damage to one storage area is easier to compensate for.
"It's not just specific regions, but a whole network, that's supporting memory," said Bradley Voytek, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and first author of two recent journal articles describing EEG (electroencephalogram) studies of people with strokes. Voytek recently completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
"The view has always been, if you lose point A, point B will be on all the time to take over," said co-author Dr. Robert Knight, UC Berkeley professor of psychology and head of the Wills Institute. "Brad has shown that's not true. It actually only comes on if it's needed.
"Most of the time, it acts like a normal piece of brain tissue. It only kicks into hyperdrive when the bad part of the brain is particularly challenged, and it does it in less than a second. This is a remarkably fluid neural plasticity, but it isn't the standard 'B took over for A,' it's really 'B will take over if and when needed.'"
One of the papers, published Nov. 3 in the online edition of Neuron and scheduled for the Nov. 4 print issue of the journal, describes a study of stroke patients who have lost partial function in their prefrontal cortex, the area at the top front of each hemisphere of the brain that governs memory and attention.[/COLOR][/SIZE][SIZE="4"]Voytek put electrodes on the scalps of six stroke patients as well as six controls with normal prefrontal cortex function, and showed each patient a series of pictures to test his or her ability to remember images for a brief time, so-called visual working memory. Visual working memory is what allows us to compare two objects, keeping one in memory while we look at another, as when we choose the ripest of two bananas.
"We presented each subject with a really quick flash of a visual stimulus and then showed them a second one a little while later, and they had to say whether it was the same as the first," Voytek explained. "The idea is that you're building a representation of your visual world somehow in your brain -- and we don't know how that happens -- so that later you can compare this internal phantom representation you're holding in your mind to a real world visual stimulus, something you actually see. These patients can't do that as well."
EEGs provide millisecond measurements of brain activity, though they do not pinpoint active areas as precisely as other techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). On the other hand, fMRI averages brain activity over seconds, making it impossible to distinguish split-second brain processes or even tell which occur first.
The neuroscientists discovered that when images were shown to the eye opposite the lesion (output of the left eye goes to the right hemisphere, and vice versa), the damaged prefrontal cortex did not respond, but the intact prefrontal cortex on the same side as the image responded within 300 to 600 milliseconds.
"EEG, which is very good for looking at the timing of activity in the brain, showed that part of the brain is compensating on a subsecond basis," Voytek said. "It is very rapid compensation: Within a second of challenging the bad side, the intact side of the brain is coming online to pick up the slack."
"This has implications for what physicians measure to see if there's effective recovery after stroke," Knight said, "and suggests that you can take advantage of this to train the area you would like to take over from a damaged area instead of just globally training the brain."
In a second paper that appeared online Oct. 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Voytek and Knight looked at visual working memory in patients with damage not only to the prefrontal cortex, but also to the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are a pair of regions directly below the brain's cortex that are involved in motor control and learning and that are impaired in patients with Parkinson's disease.
The patients with stroke damage to the prefrontal cortex had, as suspected, problems when images were presented to the eye on the side opposite the lesion. Those with basal ganglia damage, however, had problems with visual working memory no matter which part of the visual field was shown the image.
"The PNAS paper shows that the basal ganglia lesions cause a more broad network deficit, whereas the prefrontal cortex lesions cause a more within-hemisphere deficit in memory," Voytek said. "This demonstrates, again, that memory is a network phenomenon rather than a specifically regional phenomenon.""If you take out one basal ganglia, the logic would be that you would be Parkinsonian on half your body. But you're not," Knight said. "One basal ganglia on one side is able to somehow control fluid movement on both sides."
"Brad's data show that for cognitive control, it's just the opposite. One small basal ganglia lesion on one side has global effects on both sides of your body," he added. "This really points out that for this deep subcortical basal ganglia area, you need all of it to function normally. I don't think anybody would have really suspected that."
Knight hopes to conduct follow up studies using direct recordings from electrodes in the brain to further explore the various brain regions involved in visual memory and other types of memory and attention governed by the prefrontal cortex.
"Cognition and memory are the highest forms of human behavior," Knight said. "It is not just about raising or lowering your hand, or whether you can or cannot see. These are the things that make us human, and that is what makes it so interesting for us."
Other coauthors of the Neuron paper are Matar Davis and Elena Yago of UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; Francisco Barceló of the Institut Universitari d'Investigació en Ciències de la Salut at the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma de Mallorca, Spain; and Edward K. Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene.
The work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, and by an American Psychological Association Diversity Program in Neuroscience grant to Voytek.[/SIZE]

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Pretoria – Several ministers have pledged to ensure South Africa’s children get only the best education at school – one of government’s top...

More South Africa Education ...

Pretoria – The Basic Education Department is hoping to identify the gaps to fill before implementing its Action Plan to 2014: Towards the Realisation of Schooling 2025.

The department and education stakeholders are currently attending a symposium, which is expected to help the department refine its strategies and interventions towards improving the quality of basic education.

The department invited the stakeholders to broaden the platform for engagement and assist the department in sharpening all efforts to achieve the goals of the plan.

Early this year, the department came up with Action Plan to 2014, which will form part of a larger vision called Schooling 2025.

The plan, which is currently out for public comment, explains the 27 national goals that lie at the heart of the vision for education.

The first 13 goals include output goals dealing with better school results and enrolment of learners in schools, while the remaining 14 goals deal with things needed in order to realise the output goals.

The 13 goals aim to increase the number of learners in Grades 3, 6 and 9, and ensure that by the end of the schooling year, they have mastered the minimum language and numeracy competencies for those grades.

They also aim to increase the number of Grade 12 learners who pass mathematics and physical science and become eligible for a bachelor’s programme at university.

Furthermore, the plan aims to:

- Improve the average performance in mathematics of grade 8 learners.
- Ensure that all children remain effectively enrolled in school until they turn 15.
- Improve access of children to quality early childhood development below Grade 1.
- Improve the grade promotion of learners in Grades 1 to 9.
- Improve the access of youth to Further Education and Training beyond Grade 9.

Speaking to stakeholders, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said the plan was a vehicle for achieving Outcome 1 of the 12 outcomes representing the top priorities of government, which speaks to improved quality of basic education.

“The question of quality explains precisely why we have requested you to join hands with us to chart a way forward for quality schooling in South Africa, using the Action Plan as a point of departure.

“One purpose of the plan is to bring greater rigour into the monitoring of the schooling system and promote better research into challenges faced by the sector,” Motshekga said. - BuaNe

Pretoria - The ministry responsible for persons with physical impairments has called for support systems to be put in place to enable learners with special needs to graduate from lower grades to matric and beyond.

During her visit to the Athlone School for the Blind in Bellville, Minister for Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities, Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, noted that while the pass rate from special schools was good, the number of learners registered for matric remained low.

She was at the school to wish Grade 12 learners good luck for their examinations.

"Education is the only tool that can pull our children out of various challenges they are facing and open new opportunities for their future," she said.

Nationally, a total of 872 learners enrolled in special schools wrote matric examination last year; 697 of them passed, which represents a close to 80 percent pass rate.

In Athlone School for the Blind, the 12 matriculants last year produced a 100 percent pass rate, with the school remaining one of the best in the whole district.

Mayende-Sibiya said she was glad that the school has increased the number of learners registered for matric to 32 this year.

She said the department was insisting that all new schools that are being built by government should be accessible to children with disabilities as required by the new National School Infrastructure Norms.

"This will be in line with South Africa's commitment to achieve the full enjoyment of all human rights, including the right to education by children with disabilities on an equal basis with other children," Mayende-Sibiya said.

She said that the Inclusive Education Policy is being implemented on an incremental basis, with the main aim of the programme being to introduce a number of systemic measures, which would lay the foundation for a system-wide implementation of the policy.

"In piloting the policy, 30 mainstream schools were selected for conversion into full-service schools to serve as models of full-inclusivity. Another 34 special schools were selected for upgrading and conversion into resource centres to support the mainstream schools.

"District-based Support Teams were established and trained to provide support services in an integrated way, thus maximizing existing services through coordination and inter-sectoral collaboration," said the minister.

While some schools started with their final examination on Monday, Athlone learners will only start writing their first paper on Wednesday.

Nationally, learners will be sitting for History Paper One, Maritime Economics, Equine Studies and Foreign Languages.

Mayende-Sibiya also visited Jan Kriel School learners to wish them luck. - BuaNews

Pretoria - Basic Education Minister Education, Angie Motshekga, has encouraged learners to read and help turn South Africa into a prosperous development state.

“I cannot over emphasise the importance of books and reading. Illiteracy is a national threat. There is no better time to start promoting reading and the value of books than now,” the minister said at the launch of Chevron-sponsored Library and Learning Centre at Inkwenkwezi Secondary School in the Western Cape.

“Without books and other learning materials, turning South Africa into a truly and prosperous developmental state would remain a dream never to be attained.

“Building such a state that is committed to the creation of a better life for all our people needs young people who can read and write, add and subtract, reason and pontificate,” she said.

However, the minister said this can only be possible when government, the private sector and communities work together to make education a societal issue.

“All of us have a duty to ensure we have learners who can read, write and calculate,” she said.

Research has shown that many learners who complete grade 6 are not able to write even simple sentences or do basic arithmetic.

“This problem of an unacceptably low level of learning can be found across all grades. But above all, there are too many learners who, after many years of school, have not mastered the skills they should have mastered.

“Our mission remains that of a South Africa in which all our people have access to lifelong quality education, which will in turn contribute towards improving the quality of life and building a peaceful, prosperous and democratic society,” she said.

Research has shown that learners with access to library resources deliver higher achievements, improved literacy levels and have a greater success rate.

“With adequate levels of connectivity, libraries and information literacy programmes, schools can best prepare learners to meet the challenges of the knowledge economy,” she said.

Motshekga said as government they were working hard at addressing the backlogs in library resource provision and have opted for an incremental approach to the provisioning of library resources.

The department’s multi-faceted approach to combating illiteracy includes a National Reading Strategy for schools.

The strategy is aimed at developing learners who read to learn, and read for enjoyment and enrichment. The availability of libraries is one of the enabling factors for achieving this goal. - BuaNews

Pretoria - They may have different views on the standard of today’s papers, but most Grade 12 learners were optimistic about the outcome and had no...

More South Africa Education ...

Durban – Ernst Michael Savery is 70-years-old and experienced a difficult life during his younger days. His determination to survive in the face of poverty and help his family is a trait that has become omnipresent in his life writes Kemantha Govender.

Savery, an enthusiastic runner, did not have an opportunity to go to school and is now taking the opportunity to be educated with gusto.

He is now one of thousands of people in KwaZulu-Natal participating in Adult Basic Education Training (ABET). The programme seeks to empower South Africans through basic education and build confidence in the lives of thousands of people every day.

Focus is placed on literacy and mathematics which are taught up to four levels and progress to each level is dependent entirely on the individual. The education department runs the programme across the country at various centres.

Faced with a life in daunting and poor circumstances, Savery found himself looking for employment at a clothing factory, to help supplement the family income. He then worked for Transnet for over 20 years and spent the last six years of his working life as a scholar patrol at a primary school in Phoenix.

“My family is very happy and very proud of all that I am doing,” said Savery.

With pride he hands over an assessment card which shows a 96 percent pass in Maths and English. He is on level two of the programme.

“I always wanted to finish school. I saw the ABET programme on TV and decided to find one close to where I work. I went to a school in the area and enquired about the course and have been here since 2008,” said Savery.

KwaZulu-Natal had a staggering 1.2 million people who could not read or write when the programme started.

That number has dropped significantly due to the success of the programme. Many people like Savery endured economic hardships during the apartheid era and schooling was hardly an option.

“Things were very hard when I was growing up. I worked in factories trying to get by. Jobs were tight and you had to stick with whatever you got,” he explains.

But now the great-grand father is making great progress with his education. He spends a lot of his time practising what he learns during his classes but also enjoys quality family time with his six children and ten grandchildren.

“The teacher is very good. I understand what I am being taught quite easily. I try to use what I learn in everyday life. I love reading the bible and other spiritual books,” he says.

Savery also has a great interest in the arts and culture and is glad that he has the time to appreciate music, films and books. “I play the guitar and like listening to the Shadows, Radars and Latin American music”.

After Savery completes the four levels, he has set his sights on becoming acquainted with the computer.

“I want to learn about computer and how to use them, so I am hoping that is the next step for me. I want to go as far as I can go,” he added.

While Savery doesn’t struggle too much in learning new concepts at his age, facilitators who play an integral role in the programme’s success face a few challenges with some learners.

Lutchmi Naidoo, who is Savery’s facilitator, said it is a challenging task but equally rewarding working with older people.

“It is very trying because they are adults and most times it takes longer for them to digest information. They get excited when they initially come and sometimes it’s hard for them to continue that momentum,” said Naidoo.

The old age does impact on their learning capabilities but the tenacity and perseverance in some of the learners is admirable to say the least, said Naidoo.

“In some cases whatever is taught is forgotten in the next level. But the personal lessons also bring joy to me. I feel when the learners progress, that I too achieved something and it ends up contributing to the community,” said Naidoo.

Terry Sooklall, a co-ordinator of the ABET centre that Savery attends, feels there is a great need for the programme.

“I have been a teacher for 27 years. This is my pet project. I feel without basic education many older people are being taken advantage of because they simply can’t read and write. Therefore, such a centre was created,” said Sooklall.

According to Sooklall, one of the first learners at the centre was a 74-year-old woman who didn’t go to school at all. She was able to understand basic concepts in Maths and write words and sentences. She is an example of perseverance.

“With adult learners you have got to be patient. They take much longer to learn and forget things easily. You have to repeat things a few times. But they are so motivated and they want to achieve their educational goals,” said Sooklall.

Meanwhile, on the south coast of Durban in the Sisonke district, the ABET programme is proving its effectiveness. In 2010 over 4000 learners, of which at least 3000 were women, enrolled for the programme.

Lindiwe Mkhize a facilitator in Ixopo has worked her way up to becoming a supervisor to the facilitators in the district.

Mkhize, also affected by poverty, had no money to study after completing school in 1993. After also seeking employment in manual labour, she saved money to complete the one year ABET course.

“They say I am a community hero but it gives me nothing but joy to be able to make a difference in my community. To see people progressing and contribute to better living standards is great,” said Mkhize.

“I encourage all South Africans out there who needs this programme to join and go study. It is helping so many people become empowered,” said Mkhize.

She herself will study further after registering for a degree in education at the University of South Africa (UNISA).

KwaZulu-Natal Education MEC, Senzo Mchunu, praised all the literacy programmes in the province for their effectiveness.

“The literacy programmes are continuously improving literacy levels in KwaZulu-Natal. The ABET programme has done a lot to improve people’s lives who had no hope and were condemned to a life of illiteracy,” said Mchunu.

The MEC added that an impressive number of people have been completing matric and pursuing tertiary education.

“We are proud that this programme is in line with our democratic country that seeks to empower everyone,” said Mchunu. - BuaNews

Pretoria - President Jacob Zuma has urged school children to play chess referring to it as one education tool that can strengthen a child’s mind.

“We want to convince parents and teachers that chess is one of the most powerful educational tools available to strengthen and enhance a child's mind,” said President Zuma at the gala dinner of Moves for Life Chess Programme on Sunday.

Zuma - an avid chess player - said chess was a serious sport contrary to popular belief and is a game that young people should be encouraged to play.

“It is an important game in many respects, the main benefit being that it contributes to the development of strategic thinking as well as concentration, analytical skills and problem solving. These are traits that are important for school going children,” said Zuma.

He said the game had stood the test of time adding that even new technology-driven games had not killed the game of chess.

“No amount of video games can teach a child the same level of patience, strategic thinking, concentration, analytical skills and the attention to detail that they would gain from this timeless intellectual game.”

He said government and the private sector needed to work together to create a culture where chess can be used as both an educational and motivational tool for children.

“We will play our part as government. Both the Departments of Basic Education as well as Sports and Recreation are involved and already working to promote the game,” said the President at the launch of the programme. - BuaNews

Pretoria - The development of African languages at South Africa’s higher education institutions are critical for the future of the country’s education system, Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande said on Friday.

“Colonial languages have continued to dominate our institutions of higher education with little or no effort to address this situation, which has led to the suffering of many of our languages as a result,” he said a Round Table discussion on African languages held at Unisa.

An expert report, commissioned by the department, shows that only two of the country’s universities had made progress in terms of producing more graduates in African languages between 2005 and 2009, while the rest have seen a decline over the years.

The department now says, unless something is done, the future of South African languages as areas of academic study and research is under threat. The decline of these languages at universities has meant the closure of several language departments, dealing a blow to the country’s literature and culture.

Nzimande has promised to work with the Department of Arts and Culture to come up with ways to attract more students to enroll in African languages.

Long term planning would include developing policies that would ensure the use of these languages as medium of instruction in science and economic courses.

Recommendations include offering more bursaries to students who show interest in African languages studies and incentives for teachers who upgrade their studies in this field.

Evidence suggests that the majority of the country’s universities and universities of technology use English as the sole medium of instruction or, as it is the case in most historically African institutions, offer parallel instruction in English and Afrikaans.

According to the Council of Higher Education 2001 report, the University of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape remained the only institution where at the level of policy, Afrikaans was the only language of tuition for undergraduate level.

The department said while English and Afrikaans were the two most frequently reported home languages, the extent of linguistic diversity was evident in the fact that 50 percent of the total student enrolment reported an indigenous African language or other language as a home language.

“The extent of linguistic diversity within individual institutions depends on the degree to which students are recruited locally, regionally or nationally,” said the report. – BuaNews

[SIZE="7"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Adult Brain Can Change Within Seconds
ScienceDaily (July 30, 2009) —[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[SIZE="6"]The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity.[/SIZE]

[COLOR="Black"][SIZE="5"]The brain’s tendency to call upon these connections could help explain the curious phenomenon of “referred sensations,” in which a person with an amputated arm “feels” sensations in the missing limb when he or she is touched on the face. Scientists believe this happens because the part of the brain that normally receives input from the arm begins “referring” to signals coming from a nearby brain region that receives information from the face.
“We found these referred sensations in the visual cortex, too,” said senior author Nancy Kanwisher of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, referring to the findings of a paper being published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. “When we temporarily deprived part of the visual cortex from receiving input, subjects reported seeing squares distorted as rectangles. We were surprised to find these referred visual sensations happening as fast as we could measure, within two seconds.”
Many scientists think that this kind of reorganized response to sensory information reflects a rewiring in the brain, or a growth of new connections.
“But these distortions happened too quickly to result from structural changes in the cortex,” Kanwisher explained. “So we think the connections were already there but were silent, and that the brain is constantly recalibrating the connections through short-term plasticity mechanisms.”
First author Daniel Dilks, a postdoctoral researcher in Kanwisher’s lab, first found the square-to-rectangle distortion in a patient who suffered a stroke that deprived a portion of his visual cortex from receiving input. The stroke created a blind region in his field of vision. When a square object was placed outside this blind region, the patient perceived it as a rectangle stretching into the blind area — a result of the the deprived neurons now responding to a neighboring part of the visual field.
“But the patient’s cortex had been deprived of visual information for a long time, so we did not know how quickly the adult visual cortex could change following deprivation,” Dilks said. “To find out, we took advantage of the natural blind spot in each eye, using a simple perceptual test in healthy volunteers with normal vision.”
Blind spots occur because the retina has no photoreceptors where the optic nerve exits the eye, so the visual cortex receives no stimulation from that point. We do not perceive our blind spots because the left eye sees what is in the right eye’s blind area, and vice versa. Even when one eye is closed, we are not normally aware of a gap in our visual field.
It takes a perceptual test to reveal the blind spot, which involves covering one eye and moving an object towards the blind spot until it “disappears” from view.
[Click here to find your own blind spot: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/media/blindSpotDemo.shtml].
Dilks and colleagues used this test to see how soon after the cortex is deprived of information that volunteers begin to perceive shape distortions. They presented different-sized rectangles just outside the subjects’ blind spot and asked subjects to judge the height and width at different time points after one eye was patched.
The volunteers perceived the rectangles elongating just two seconds after their eye was covered — much quicker than expected. When the eye patch was removed, the distortions vanished just as fast as they had appeared.
“So the visual cortex changes its response almost immediately to sensory deprivation and to new input,” Kanwisher explained. “Our study shows the stunning ability of the brain to adapt to moment-to-moment changes in experience even in adulthood.”
Chris Baker (NIH) and Yicong Liu (MIT undergraduate student) contributed to this study, which was supported by the NIH and NIMH.[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[SIZE="7"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Younger Brains Are Easier to Rewire -- Brain Regions Can Switch Functions
ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2010) —[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[SIZE="5"]A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life.
The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, shed light on how the brain wires itself during the first few years of life, and could help scientists understand how to optimize the brain's ability to be rewired later in life. That could become increasingly important as medical advances make it possible for congenitally blind people to have their sight restored, said MIT postdoctoral associate Marina Bedny, lead author of the paper.
In the 1950s and '60s, scientists began to think that certain brain functions develop normally only if an individual is exposed to relevant information, such as language or visual information, within a specific time period early in life. After that, they theorized, the brain loses the ability to change in response to new input.
Animal studies supported this theory. For example, cats blindfolded during the first months of life are unable to see normally after the blindfolds are removed. Similar periods of blindfolding in adulthood have no effect on vision.
However, there have been indications in recent years that there is more wiggle room than previously thought, said Bedny, who works in the laboratory of MIT assistant professor Rebecca Saxe, also an author of the Current Biology paper. Many neuroscientists now support the idea of a period early in life after which it is difficult, but not impossible, to rewire the brain.
Bedny, Saxe and their colleagues wanted to determine if a part of the brain known as the middle temporal complex (MT/MST) can be rewired at any time or only early in life. They chose to study MT/MST in part because it is one of the most studied visual areas. In sighted people, the MT region is specialized for motion vision.[/SIZE]