Researcher: John Gabrieli

Practicing mindfulness with an app may improve children’s mental health

Anne Trafton |

Many studies have found that practicing mindfulness — defined as cultivating an open-minded attention to the present moment — has benefits for children. Children who receive mindfulness training at school have demonstrated improvements in attention and behavior, as well as greater mental health.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, sending millions of students home from school, a group of MIT researchers wondered if remote, app-based mindfulness practices could offer similar benefits. In a study conducted during 2020 and 2021, they report that children who used a mindfulness app at home for 40 days showed improvements in several aspects of mental health, including reductions in stress and negative emotions such as loneliness and fear.

The findings suggest that remote, app-based mindfulness interventions, which could potentially reach a larger number of children than school-based approaches, could offer mental health benefits, the researchers say.

“There is growing and compelling scientific evidence that mindfulness can support mental well-being and promote mental health in diverse children and adults,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and the senior author of the study, which appears this week in the journal Mindfulness.

Researchers in Gabrieli’s lab also recently reported that children who showed higher levels of mindfulness were more emotionally resilient to the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“To some extent, the impact of Covid is out of your control as an individual, but your ability to respond to it and to interpret it may be something that mindfulness can help with,” says MIT graduate student Isaac Treves, who is the lead author of both studies.

Pandemic resilience

After the pandemic began in early 2020, Gabrieli’s lab decided to investigate the effects of mindfulness on children who had to leave school and isolate from friends. In a study that appeared in the journal PLOS One in July, the researchers explored whether mindfulness could boost children’s resilience to negative emotions that the pandemic generated, such as frustration and loneliness.

Working with students between 8 and 10 years old, the researchers measured the children’s mindfulness using a standardized assessment that captures their tendency to blame themselves, ruminate on negative thoughts, and suppress their feelings.

The researchers also asked the children questions about how much the pandemic had affected different aspects of their lives, as well as questions designed to assess their levels of anxiety, depression, stress, and negative emotions such as worry or fear.

Among children who showed the highest levels of mindfulness, there was no correlation between how much the pandemic impacted them and negative feelings. However, in children with lower levels of mindfulness, there was a strong correlation between Covid-19 impact and negative emotions.

The children in this study did not receive any kind of mindfulness training, so their responses reflect their tendency to be mindful at the time they answered the researchers’ questions. The findings suggest that children with higher levels of mindfulness were less likely to get caught up in negative emotions or blame themselves for the negative things they experienced during the pandemic.

“This paper was our best attempt to look at mindfulness specifically in the context of Covid and to think about what are the factors that may help children adapt to the changing circumstances,” Treves says. “The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t worry about pandemics because we can just help the kids with mindfulness. People are able to be resilient when they’re in systems that support them, and in families that support them.”

Remote interventions

The researchers then built on that study by exploring whether a remote, app-based intervention could effectively increase mindfulness and improve mental health. Researchers in Gabrieli’s lab have previously shown that students who received mindfulness training in middle school showed better academic performance, received fewer suspensions, and reported less stress than those who did not receive the training.

For the new study, reported today in Mindfulness, the researchers worked with the same children they had recruited for the PLOS One study and divided them into three groups of about 80 students each.

One group received mindfulness training through an app created by Inner Explorer, a nonprofit that also develops school-based meditation programs. Those children were instructed to engage in mindfulness training five days a week, including relaxation exercises, breathing exercises, and other forms of meditation.

For comparison purposes, the other two groups were asked to use an app for listening to audiobooks (not related to mindfulness). One group was simply given the audiobook app and encouraged to listen at their own pace, while the other group also had weekly one-on-one virtual meetings with a facilitator.

At the beginning and end of the study, the researchers evaluated each participant’s levels of mindfulness, along with measures of mental health such as anxiety, stress, and depression. They found that in all three groups, mental health improved over the course of the eight-week study, and each group also showed increases in mindfulness and prosociality (engaging in helpful behavior).

Additionally, children in the mindfulness group showed some improvements that the other groups didn’t, including a more significant decrease in stress. They also found that parents in the mindfulness group reported that their children experienced more significant decreases in negative emotions such as anger and sadness. Students who practiced the mindfulness exercises the most days showed the greatest benefits.

The researchers were surprised to see that there were no significant differences in measures of anxiety and depression between the mindfulness group and audiobook groups; they hypothesize that may be because students who interacted with a facilitator in one of the audiobook groups also experienced beneficial effects on their mental health.

Overall, the findings suggest that there is value in remote, app-based mindfulness training, especially if children engage with the exercises consistently and receive encouragement from parents, the researchers say. Apps also offer the ability to reach a larger number of children than school-based programs, which require more training and resources.

“There are a lot of great ways to incorporate mindfulness training into schools, but in general, it’s more resource-intensive than having people download an app. So, in terms of pure scalability and cost-effectiveness, apps are useful,” Treves says. “Another good thing about apps is that the kids can go at their own pace and repeat practices that they like, so there’s more freedom of choice.”

The research was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as part of the Reach Every Reader Project, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

Using the tools of neuroscience to personalize medicine

by Thea Singer |

Profile picture of Sadie Zacharek
Graduate student Sadie Zacharek. Photo: Steph Stevens

From summer internships as an undergraduate studying neuroscience at the University of Notre Dame, Sadie Zacharek developed interests in areas ranging from neuroimaging to developmental psychopathologies, from basic-science research to clinical translation. When she interviewed with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience, for a position in his lab as a graduate fellow, everything came together.

“The brain provides a window not only into dysfunction but also into response to treatment,” she says. “John and I both wanted to explore how we might use neuroimaging as a step toward personalized medicine.”

Zacharek joined the Gabrieli lab in 2020 and currently holds the Sheldon and Janet Razin’59 Fellowship for 2023-2024. In the Gabrieli lab, she has been designing and helping launch studies focusing on the neural mechanisms driving childhood depression and social anxiety disorder with the aim of developing strategies to predict which treatments will be most effective for individual patients.

Helping children and adults

“Depression in children is hugely understudied,” says Zacharek. “Most of the research has focused on adult and adolescent depression.” But the clinical presentation differs in the two groups, she says. “In children, irritability can be the primary presenting symptom rather than melancholy.” To get to the root of childhood depression, she is exploring both the brain basis of the disorder and how the parent-child relationship might influence symptoms. “Parents help children develop their emotion-regulation skills,” she says. “Knowing the underlying mechanisms could, in family-focused therapy, help them turn a ‘downward spiral’ into irritability, into an ‘upward spiral,’ away from it.”

The studies she is conducting include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of children to explore their brain responses to positive and negative stimuli, fMRI of both the child and parent to compare maps of their brains’ functional connectivity, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to explore the neurochemical environment of both, including quantities of neurometabolites that indicate inflammation (higher levels have been found to correlate with depressive pathology).

“If we could find a normative range for neurochemicals and then see how far someone has deviated in depression, or a neural signature of elevated activity in a brain region, that could serve as a biomarker for future interventions,” she says. “Such a biomarker would be especially relevant for children given that they are less able to articulately convey their symptoms or internal experience.”

“The brain provides a window not only into dysfunction but also into response to treatment.” – Sadie Zacharek

Social anxiety disorder is a chronic and disabling condition that affects about 7.1 percent of U.S. adults. Treatment usually involves cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), and then, if there is limited response, the addition of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), as an anxiolytic.

But what if research could reveal the key neurocircuitry of social anxiety disorder as well as changes associated with treatment? That could open the door to predicting treatment outcome.

Zacharek is collecting neuroimaging data, as well as clinical assessments, from participants. The participants diagnosed with social anxiety disorder will then undergo 12 weeks of group CBT, followed by more data collection, and then individual CBT for 12 weeks plus an SSRI for those who do not benefit from the group CBT. The results from those two time points will help determine the best treatment for each person.

“We hope to build a predictive model that could enable clinicians to scan a new patient and select the optimal treatment,” says Zacharek. “John’s many long-standing relationships with clinicians in this area make all of these translational studies possible.”

Partnership with MIT Museum explores relationship between neuroscience and society

by Jean Cummings | MIT Museum |

What does a healthy relationship between neuroscience and society look like? How do we set the conditions for that relationship to flourish? Researchers and staff at the McGovern Institute and the MIT Museum have been exploring these questions with a five-month planning grant from the Dana Foundation.

Between October 2022 and March 2023, the team tested the potential for an MIT Center for Neuroscience and Society through a series of MIT-sponsored events that were attended by students and faculty of nearby Cambridge Public Schools. The goal of the project was to learn more about what happens when the distinct fields of neuroscience, ethics, and public engagement are brought together to work side-by-side.

Researchers assist volunteer in mock MRI scanner
Gabrieli lab members Sadie Zacharek (left) and Shruti Nishith (right) demonstrate how the MRI mock scanner works with a student volunteer from the Cambridge Public Schools. Photo: Emma Skakel, MIT Museum

Middle schoolers visit McGovern

Over four days in February, more than 90 sixth graders from Rindge Avenue Upper Campus (RAUC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, visited the McGovern Institute and participated in hands-on experiments and discussions about the ethical, legal, and social implications of neuroscience research. RAUC is one of four middle schools in the city of Cambridge with an economically, racially, and culturally diverse student population. The middle schoolers interacted with an MIT team led by McGovern Scientific Advisor Jill R. Crittenden, including seventeen McGovern neuroscientists, three MIT Museum outreach coordinators, and neuroethicist Stephanie Bird, a member of the Dana Foundation planning grant team.

“It is probably the only time in my life I will see a real human brain.” – RAUC student

The students participated in nine activities each day, including trials of brain-machine interfaces, close-up examinations of preserved human brains, a tour of McGovern’s imaging center in which students watched as their teacher’s brain was scanned, and a visit to the MIT Museum’s interactive Artificial Intelligence Gallery.

Imagine-IT, a brain-machine interface designed by a team of middle school students during a visit to the McGovern Institute.

To close out their visit, students worked in groups alongside experts to invent brain-computer interfaces designed to improve or enhance human abilities. At each step, students were introduced to ethical considerations through consent forms, questions regarding the use of animal and human brains, and the possible impacts of their own designs on individuals and society.

“I admit that prior to these four days, I would’ve been indifferent to the inclusion of children’s voices in a discussion about technically complex ethical questions, simply because they have not yet had any opportunity to really understand how these technologies work,” says one researcher involved in the visit. “But hearing the students’ questions and ideas has changed my perspective. I now believe it is critically important that all age groups be given a voice when discussing socially relevant issues, such as the ethics of brain computer interfaces or artificial intelligence.”

 

For more information on the proposed MIT Center for Neuroscience and Society, visit the MIT Museum website.

2023 MacVicar Faculty Fellows named

Anne Trafton |

The Office of the Vice Chancellor and the Registrar’s Office have announced this year’s Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellows: professor of brain and cognitive sciences John Gabrieli, associate professor of literature Marah Gubar, professor of biology Adam C. Martin, and associate professor of architecture Lawrence “Larry” Sass.

For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program is named in honor of Margaret MacVicar, the first dean for undergraduate education and founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). New fellows are chosen every year through a competitive nomination process that includes submission of letters of support from colleagues, students, and alumni; review by an advisory committee led by the vice chancellor; and a final selection by the provost. Fellows are appointed to a 10-year term and receive $10,000 per year of discretionary funds.

Gabrieli, Gubar, Martin, and Sass join an elite group of more than 130 scholars from across the Institute who are committed to curricular innovation, excellence in teaching, and supporting students both in and out of the classroom.

John Gabrieli

“When I learned of this wonderful honor, I felt gratitude — for how MIT values teaching and learning, how my faculty colleagues bring such passion to their teaching, and how the students have such great curiosity for learning,” says new MacVicar Fellow John Gabrieli.

Gabrieli PhD ’87 received a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and his PhD in behavioral neuroscience from MIT. He is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences. Gabrieli is also an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the founding director of the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili). He holds appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and studies the organization of memory, thought, and emotion in the human brain.

He joined Course 9 as a professor in 2005 and since then, he has taught over 3,000 undergraduates through the department’s introductory course, 9.00 (Introduction to Psychological Science). Gabrieli was recognized with departmental awards for excellence in teaching in 2009, 2012, and 2015. Highly sought after by undergraduate researchers, the Gabrieli Laboratory (GabLab) hosts five to 10 UROPs each year.

A unique element of Gabrieli’s classes is his passionate, hands-on teaching style and his use of interactive demonstrations, such as optical illusions and personality tests, to help students grasp some of the most fundamental topics in psychology.

His former teaching assistant Daniel Montgomery ’22 writes, “I was impressed by his enthusiasm and ability to keep students engaged throughout the lectures … John clearly has a desire to help students become excited about the material he’s teaching.”

Senior Elizabeth Carbonell agrees: “The excitement professor Gabrieli brought to lectures by starting with music every time made the classroom an enjoyable atmosphere conducive to learning … he always found a way to make every lecture relatable to the students, teaching psychological concepts that would shine a light on our own human emotions.”

Lecturer and 9.00 course coordinator Laura Frawley says, “John constantly innovates … He uses research-based learning techniques in his class, including blended learning, active learning, and retrieval practice.” His findings on blended learning resulted in two MITx offerings including 9.00x (Learning and Memory), which utilizes a nontraditional approach to assignments and exams to improve how students retrieve and remember information.

In addition, he is known for being a devoted teacher who believes in caring for the student as a whole. Through MITili’s Mental Wellness Initiative, Gabrieli, along with a compassionate team of faculty and staff, are working to better understand how mental health conditions impact learning.

Associate department head and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Josh McDermott calls him “an exceptional educator who has left his mark on generations of MIT undergraduate students with his captivating, innovative, and thoughtful approach to teaching.”

Mariana Gomez de Campo ’20 concurs: “There are certain professors that make their mark on students’ lives; professor Gabrieli permanently altered the course of mine.”

Laura Schulz, MacVicar Fellow and associate department head of brain and cognitive sciences, remarks, “His approach is visionary … John’s manner with students is unfailingly gracious … he hastens to remind them that they are as good as it gets, the smartest and brightest of their generation … it is the kind of warm, welcoming, inclusive approach to teaching that subtly but effectively reminds students that they belong here at MIT … It is little wonder that they love him.”

Marah Gubar

Marah Gubar joined MIT as an associate professor of literature in 2014. She received her BA in English literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a PhD from Princeton University. Gubar taught in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh and served as director of the Children’s Literature Program. She received MIT’s James A. and Ruth Levitan Teaching Award in 2019 and the Teaching with Digital Technology Award in 2020.

Gubar’s research focuses on children’s literature, history of children’s theater, performance, and 19th- and 20th-century representations of childhood. Her research and pedagogies underscore the importance of integrated learning.

Colleagues at MIT note her efficacy in introducing new concepts and new subjects into the literature curriculum during her tenure as curricular chair. Gubar set the stage for wide-ranging curricular improvements, resulting in a host of literature subjects on interrelated topics within and across disciplines.

Gubar teaches several classes, including 21L.452 (Literature and Philosophy) and 21L.500 (How We Got to Hamilton). Her lectures provide uniquely enriching learning experiences in which her students are encouraged to dive into literary texts; craft thoughtful, persuasive arguments; and engage in lively intellectual debate.

Gubar encourages others to bring fresh ideas and think outside the box. For example, her seminar on “Hamilton” challenges students to recontextualize the hip-hop musical in several intellectual traditions. Professor Eric Klopfer, head of the Comparative Media Studies Program/Writing and interim head of literature, calls Gubar “a thoughtful, caring instructor, and course designer … She thinks critically about whose story is being told and by whom.”

MacVicar Fellow and professor of literature Stephen Tapscott praises her experimentation, abstract thinking, and storytelling: “Professor Gubar’s ability to frame intellectual questions in terms of problems, developments, and performance is an important dimension of the genius of her teaching.”

“Marah is hands-down the most enthusiastic, effective, and engaged professor I had the pleasure of learning from at MIT,” writes one student. “She’s one of the few instructors I’ve had who never feels the need to reassert her place in the didactic hierarchy, but approaches her students as intellectual equals.”

Tapscott continues, “She welcomes participation in ways that enrich the conversation, open new modes of communication, and empower students as autonomous literary critics. In professor Gubar’s classroom we learn by doing … and that progress also includes ‘doing’ textual analysis, cultural history, and abstract literary theory.”

Gubar is also a committed mentor and student testimonials highlight her supportive approach. One of her former students remarked that Gubar “has a strong drive to be inclusive, and truly cares about ‘getting it right’ … her passion for literature and teaching, together with her drive for inclusivity, her ability to take accountability, and her compassion and empathy for her students, make [her] a truly remarkable teacher.”

On receiving this award Marah Gubar writes, “The best word I can think of to describe how I reacted to hearing that I had received this very overwhelming honor is ‘plotzing.’ The Yiddish verb ‘to plotz’ literally means to crack, burst, or collapse, so that captures how undone I was. I started to cry, because it suddenly struck me how much joy my father, Edward Gubar, would have taken in this amazing news. He was a teacher, too, and he died during the first phase of this terrible pandemic that we’re still struggling to get through.”

Adam C. Martin

Adam C. Martin is a professor and undergraduate officer in the Department of Biology. He studies the molecular mechanisms that underlie tissue form and function. His research interests include gastrulation, embryotic development, cytoskeletal dynamics, and the coordination of cellular behavior. Martin received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his BS in biology (genetics) from Cornell University. Martin joined the Course 7 faculty in 2011.

“I am overwhelmed with gratitude knowing that this has come from our students. The fact that they spent time to contribute to a nomination is incredibly meaningful to me,” says Martin. “I want to also thank all of my faculty colleagues with whom I have taught, appreciate, and learned immensely from over the past 12 years. I am a better teacher because of them and inspired by their dedication.”

He is committed to undergraduate education, teaching several key department offerings including 7.06 (Cell Biology), 7.016 (Introductory Biology), 7.002 (Fundamentals of Experimental Molecular Biology), and 7.102 (Introduction to Molecular Biology Techniques).

Martin’s style combines academic and scientific expertise with creative elements like props and demonstrations. His “energy and passion for the material” is obvious, writes Iain Cheeseman, associate department head and the Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology. “In addition to creating engaging lectures, Adam went beyond the standard classroom requirements to develop videos and animations (in collaboration with the Biology MITx team) to illustrate core cell biological approaches and concepts.”

What sets Martin apart is his connection with students, his positive spirit, and his welcoming demeanor. Apolonia Gardner ’22 reflects on the way he helped her outside of class through his running group, which connects younger students with seniors in his lab. “Professor Martin was literally committed to ‘going the extra mile’ by inviting his students to join him on runs around the Charles River on Friday afternoons,” she says.

Amy Keating, department head and Jay A. Stein professor of biology, and professor of biological engineering, goes on to praise Martin’s ability to attract students to Course 7 and guide them through their educational experience in his role as the director of undergraduate studies. “He hosts social events, presides at our undergraduate research symposium and the department’s undergraduate graduation and awards banquet, and works with the Biology Undergraduate Student Association,” she says.

As undergraduate officer, Martin is involved in both advising and curriculum building. He mentors UROP students, serves as a first-year advisor, and is a current member of MIT’s Committee on the Undergraduate Program (CUP).

Martin also brings a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as evidenced by his creation of a DEI journal club in his lab so that students have a dedicated space to discuss issues and challenges. Course 7 DEI officer Hallie Dowling-Huppert writes that Martin “thinks deeply about how DEI efforts are created to ensure that department members receive the maximum benefit. Adam considers all perspectives when making decisions, and is extremely empathetic and caring towards his students.”

“He makes our world so much better,” Keating observes. “Adam is a gem.”

Lawrence “Larry” Sass

Larry Sass SM ’94, PhD ’00 is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture. He earned his PhD and SM in architecture at MIT, and has a BArch from Pratt Institute in New York City. Sass joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture in 2002. His work focuses on the delivery of affordable housing for low-income families. He was included in an exhibit titled “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Sass’s teaching blends computation with design. His two signature courses, 4.500 (Design Computation: Art, Objects and Space) and 4.501 (Tiny Fab: Advancements in Rapid Design and Fabrication of Small Homes), reflect his specialization in digitally fabricating buildings and furniture from machines.

Professor and head of architecture Nicholas de Monchaux writes, “his classes provide crucial instruction and practice with 3D modeling and computer-generated rendering and animation …  [He] links digital design to fabrication, in a process that invites students to define desirable design attributes of an object, develop a digital model, prototype it, and construct it at full scale.”

More generally, Sass’ approach is to help students build confidence in their own design process through hands-on projects. MIT Class of 1942 Professor John Ochsendorf, MacVicar Fellow, and founding director of the Morningside Academy for Design with appointments in the departments of architecture and civil and environmental engineering, confirms, “Larry’s teaching is a perfect embodiment of the ‘mens et manus’ spirit … [he] requires his students to go back and forth from mind and hand throughout each design project.”

Students say that his classes are a journey of self-discovery, allowing them to learn more about themselves and their own abilities. Senior Natasha Hirt notes, “What I learned from Larry was not something one can glean from a textbook, but a new way of seeing space … he tectonically shifted my perspective on buildings. He also shifted my perspective on myself. I’m a better designer for his teachings, and perhaps more importantly, I better understand how I design.”

Senior Izzi Waitz echoes this sentiment: “Larry emphasizes the importance of intentionally thinking through your designs and being confident in your choices … he challenges, questions, and prompts you so that you learn to defend and support yourself on your own.”

As a UROP coordinator, Sass assures students that the “sky is the limit” and all ideas are welcome. Postgraduate teaching fellow and research associate Myles Sampson says, “During the last year of my SM program, I assisted Larry in conducting a year-long UROP project … He structured the learning experience in a way that allowed the students to freely flex their design muscles: no idea was too outrageous.”

Sass is equally devoted to his students outside the classroom. In his role as head of house at MacGregor House, he lives in community with more than 300 undergraduates each year, providing academic guidance, creating residential programs and recreational activities, and ensuring that student wellness and mental health is a No. 1 priority.

Professor of architecture and MacVicar Fellow Les Norford says, “In two significant ways, Larry has been ahead of his time: combining digital representation and design with making and being alert to the well-being of his students.”

“In his kindness, he honors the memory of Margaret MacVicar, as well as the spirit of MIT itself,” Hirt concludes. “He is a designer, a craftsman, and an innovator. He is an inspiration and a compass.”

On receiving this award, Sass is full of excitement: “I love teaching and being part of the MIT community. I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the MacVicar family of fellows.”

Machine learning can predict bipolar disorder in children and teens

by Jennifer Michalowski |

Bipolar disorder often begins in childhood or adolescence, triggering dramatic mood shifts and intense emotions that cause problems at home and school. But the condition is often overlooked or misdiagnosed until patients are older. New research suggests that machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, could help by identifying children who are at risk of bipolar disorder so doctors are better prepared to recognize the condition if it develops.

On October 13, 2022, researchers led by McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli and collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital reported in the Journal of Psychiatric Research that when presented with clinical data on nearly 500 children and teenagers, a machine learning model was able to identify about 75 percent of those who were later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The approach performs better than any other method of predicting bipolar disorder, and could be used to develop a simple risk calculator for health care providers.

Gabrieli says such a tool would be particularly valuable because bipolar disorder is less common in children than conditions like major depression, with which it shares symptoms, and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with which it often co-occurs. “Humans are not well tuned to watch out for rare events,” he says. “If you have a decent measure, it’s so much easier for a machine to identify than humans. And in this particular case, [the machine learning prediction] was surprisingly robust.”

Detecting bipolar disorder

Mai Uchida, Director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Child Depression Program, says that nearly two percent of youth worldwide are estimated to have bipolar disorder, but diagnosing pediatric bipolar disorder can be challenging. A certain amount of emotional turmoil is to be expected in children and teenagers, and even when moods become seriously disruptive, children with bipolar disorder are often initially diagnosed with major depression or ADHD. That’s a problem, because the medications used to treat those conditions often worsen the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Tailoring treatment to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, in contrast, can lead to significant improvements for patients and their families. “When we can give them a little bit of ease and give them a little bit of control over themselves, it really goes a long way,” Uchida says.

In fact, a poor response to antidepressants or ADHD medications can help point a psychiatrist toward a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. So too can a child’s family history, in addition to their own behavior and psychiatric history. But, Uchida says, “it’s kind of up to the individual clinician to pick up on these things.”

Uchida and Gabrieli wondered whether machine learning, which can find patterns in large, complex datasets, could focus in on the most relevant features to identify individuals with bipolar disorder. To find out, they turned to data from a study that began in the 1990s. The study, headed by Joseph Biederman, Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at Massachusetts General Hospital, had collected extensive psychiatric assessments of hundreds of children with and without ADHD, then followed those individuals for ten years.

To explore whether machine learning could find predictors of bipolar disorder within that data, Gabrieli, Uchida, and colleagues focused on 492 children and teenagers without ADHD, who were recruited to the study as controls. Over the ten years of the study, 45 of those individuals developed bipolar disorder.

Within the data collected at the study’s outset, the machine learning model was able to find patterns that associated with a later diagnosis of bipolar disorder. A few behavioral measures turned out to be particularly relevant to the model’s predictions: children and teens with combined problems with attention, aggression, and anxiety were most likely to later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. These indicators were all picked up by a standard assessment tool called the Child Behavior Checklist.

Uchida and Gabrieli say the machine learning model could be integrated into the medical record system to help pediatricians and child psychiatrists catch early warning signs of bipolar disorder. “The information that’s collected could alert a clinician to the possibility of a bipolar disorder developing,” Uchida says. “Then at least they’re aware of the risk, and they may be able to maybe pick up on some of the deterioration when it’s happening and think about either referring them or treating it themselves.”

Not every reader’s struggle is the same

Anne Trafton |

Many children struggle to learn to read, and studies have shown that students from a lower socioeconomic status (SES) background are more likely to have difficulty than those from a higher SES background.

MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that the types of difficulties that lower-SES students have with reading, and the underlying brain signatures, are, on average, different from those of higher-SES students who struggle with reading.

In a new study, which included brain scans of more than 150 children as they performed tasks related to reading, researchers found that when students from higher SES backgrounds struggled with reading, it could usually be explained by differences in their ability to piece sounds together into words, a skill known as phonological processing.

However, when students from lower SES backgrounds struggled, it was best explained by differences in their ability to rapidly name words or letters, a task associated with orthographic processing, or visual interpretation of words and letters. This pattern was further confirmed by brain activation during phonological and orthographic processing.

These differences suggest that different types of interventions may needed for different groups of children, the researchers say. The study also highlights the importance of including a wide range of SES levels in studies of reading or other types of academic learning.

“Within the neuroscience realm, we tend to rely on convenience samples of participants, so a lot of our understanding of the neuroscience components of reading in general, and reading disabilities in particular, tends to be based on higher-SES families,” says Rachel Romeo, a former graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and the lead author of the study. “If we only look at these nonrepresentative samples, we can come away with a relatively biased view of how the brain works.”

Romeo is now an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Components of reading

For many years, researchers have known that children’s scores on standardized assessments of reading are correlated with socioeconomic factors such as school spending per student or the number of children at the school who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Studies of children who struggle with reading, mostly done in higher-SES environments, have shown that the aspect of reading they struggle with most is phonological awareness: the understanding of how sounds combine to make a word, and how sounds can be split up and swapped in or out to make new words.

“That’s a key component of reading, and difficulty with phonological processing is often one of the hallmarks of dyslexia or other reading disorders,” Romeo says.

In the new study, the MIT team wanted to explore how SES might affect phonological processing as well as another key aspect of reading, orthographic processing. This relates more to the visual components of reading, including the ability to identify letters and read words.

To do the study, the researchers recruited first and second grade students from the Boston area, making an effort to include a range of SES levels. For the purposes of this study, SES was assessed by parents’ total years of formal education, which is commonly used as a measure of the family’s SES.

“We went into this not necessarily with any hypothesis about how SES might relate to the two types of processing, but just trying to understand whether SES might be impacting one or the other more, or if it affects both types the same,” Romeo says.

The researchers first gave each child a series of standardized tests designed to measure either phonological processing or orthographic processing. Then, they performed fMRI scans of each child while they carried out additional phonological or orthographic tasks.

The initial series of tests allowed the researchers to determine each child’s abilities for both types of processing, and the brain scans allowed them to measure brain activity in parts of the brain linked with each type of processing.

The results showed that at the higher end of the SES spectrum, differences in phonological processing ability accounted for most of the differences between good readers and struggling readers. This is consistent with the findings of previous studies of reading difficulty. In those children, the researchers also found greater differences in activity in the parts of the brain responsible for phonological processing.

However, the outcomes were different when the researchers analyzed the lower end of the SES spectrum. There, the researchers found that variance in orthographic processing ability accounted for most of the differences between good readers and struggling readers. MRI scans of these children revealed greater differences in brain activity in parts of the brain that are involved in orthographic processing.

Optimizing interventions

There are many possible reasons why a lower SES background might lead to difficulties in orthographic processing, the researchers say. It might be less exposure to books at home, or limited access to libraries and other resources that promote literacy. For children from this background who struggle with reading, different types of interventions might benefit them more than the ones typically used for children who have difficulty with phonological processing.

In a 2017 study, Gabrieli, Romeo, and others found that a summer reading intervention that focused on helping students develop the sensory and cognitive processing necessary for reading was more beneficial for students from lower-SES backgrounds than children from higher-SES backgrounds. Those findings also support the idea that tailored interventions may be necessary for individual students, they say.

“There are two major reasons we understand that cause children to struggle as they learn to read in these early grades. One of them is learning differences, most prominently dyslexia, and the other one is socioeconomic disadvantage,” Gabrieli says. “In my mind, schools have to help all these kinds of kids become the best readers they can, so recognizing the source or sources of reading difficulty ought to inform practices and policies that are sensitive to these differences and optimize supportive interventions.”

Gabrieli and Romeo are now working with researchers at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education to evaluate language and reading interventions that could better prepare preschool children from lower SES backgrounds to learn to read. In her new lab at the University of Maryland, Romeo also plans to further delve into how different aspects of low SES contribute to different areas of language and literacy development.

“No matter why a child is struggling with reading, they need the education and the attention to support them. Studies that try to tease out the underlying factors can help us in tailoring educational interventions to what a child needs,” she says.

The research was funded by the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Halis Family Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Studies of autism tend to exclude women, researchers find

Anne Trafton |

In recent years, researchers who study autism have made an effort to include more women and girls in their studies. However, despite these efforts, most studies of autism consistently enroll small numbers of female subjects or exclude them altogether, according to a new study from MIT.

The researchers found that a screening test commonly used to determine eligibility for studies of autism consistently winnows out a much higher percentage of women than men, creating a “leaky pipeline” that results in severe underrepresentation of women in studies of autism.

This lack of representation makes it more difficult to develop useful interventions or provide accurate diagnoses for girls and women, the researchers say.

“I think the findings favor having a more inclusive approach and widening the lens to end up being less biased in terms of who participates in research,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “The more we understand autism in men and women and nonbinary individuals, the better services and more accurate diagnoses we can provide.”

Gabrieli, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Autism Research. Anila D’Mello, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern, is the lead author of the paper. MIT Technical Associate Isabelle Frosch, Research Coordinator Cindy Li, and Research Specialist Annie Cardinaux are also authors of the paper.

Gabrieli lab researchers Annie Cardinaux (left), Anila D’Mello (center), Cindy Li (right), and Isabelle Frosch (not pictured) have
uncovered sex biases in ASD research. Photo: Steph Stevens

Screening out females

Autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed based on observation of traits such as repetitive behaviors and difficulty with language and social interaction. Doctors may use a variety of screening tests to help them make a diagnosis, but these screens are not required.

For research studies of autism, it is routine to use a screening test called the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) to determine eligibility for the study. This test, which assesses social interaction, communication, play, and repetitive behaviors, provides a quantitative score in each category, and only participants who reach certain scores qualify for inclusion in studies.

While doing a study exploring how quickly the brains of autistic adults adapt to novel events in the environment, scientists in Gabrieli’s lab began to notice that the ADOS appeared to have unequal effects on male and female participation in research. As the study progressed, D’Mello noticed some significant brain differences between the male and female subjects in the study.

To investigate these differences further, D’Mello tried to find more female participants using an MIT database of autistic adults who have expressed interest in participating in research studies. However, when she sorted through the subjects, she found that only about half of the women in the database had met the ADOS cutoff scores typically required for inclusion in autism studies, compared to 80 percent of the males.

“We realized then that there’s a discrepancy and that the ADOS is essentially screening out who eventually participated in research,” D’Mello says. “We were really surprised at how many males we retained and how many females we lost to the ADOS.”

To see if this phenomenon was more widespread, the researchers looked at six publicly available datasets, which include more than 40,000 adults who have been diagnosed as autistic. For some of these datasets, participants were screened with ADOS to determine their eligibility to participate in studies, while for others, a “community diagnosis” — diagnosis from a doctor or other health care provider — was sufficient.

The researchers found that in datasets that required ADOS screening for eligibility, the ratio of male to female participants ended up being around 8:1, while in those that required only a community diagnosis the ratios ranged from about 2:1 to 1:1.

Previous studies have found differences between behavioral patterns in autistic men and women, but the ADOS test was originally developed using a largely male sample, which may explain why it often excludes women from research studies, D’Mello says.

“There were few females in the sample that was used to create this assessment, so it might be that it’s not great at picking up the female phenotype, which may differ in certain ways — primarily in domains like social communication,” she says.

Effects of exclusion

Failure to include more women and girls in studies of autism may contribute to shortcomings in the definitions of the disorder, the researchers say.

“The way we think about it is that the field evolved perhaps an implicit bias in how autism is defined, and it was driven disproportionately by analysis of males, and recruitment of males, and so on,” Gabrieli says. “So, the definition doesn’t fit as well, on average, with the different expression of autism that seems to be more common in females.”

This implicit bias has led to documented difficulties in receiving a diagnosis for girls and women, even when their symptoms are the same as those presented by autistic boys and men.

“Many females might be missed altogether in terms of diagnoses, and then our study shows that in the research setting, what is already a small pool gets whittled down at a much larger rate than that of males,” D’Mello says.

Excluding girls and women from this kind of research study can lead to treatments that don’t work as well for them, and it contributes to the perception that autism doesn’t affect women as much as men.

“The goal is that research should directly inform treatment, therapies, and public perception,” D’Mello says. “If the research is saying that there aren’t females with autism, or that the brain basis of autism only looks like the patterns established in males, then you’re not really helping females as much as you could be, and you’re not really getting at the truth of what the disorder might be.”

The researchers now plan to further explore some of the gender and sex-based differences that appear in autism, and how they arise. They also plan to expand the gender categories that they include. In the current study, the surveys that each participant filled out asked them to choose male or female, but the researchers have updated their questionnaire to include nonbinary and transgender options.

The research was funded by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research, the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, and the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Assessing connections in the brain’s reading network

by Jennifer Michalowski |

When we read, information zips between language processing centers in different parts of the brain, traveling along neural highways in the white matter. This coordinated activity allows us to decipher words and comprehend their meaning. Many neuroscientists suspect that variations in white matter may underlie differences in reading ability, and hope that by determining which white matter tracts are involved, they will be able to guide the development of more effective interventions for children who struggle with reading skills.

In a January 14, 2022, online publication in the journal NeuroImage, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute report on the largest brain imaging study to date to evaluate the relationship between white matter structure and reading ability. Their findings suggest that if white matter deficiencies are a significant cause of reading disability, new strategies will be needed to pin them down.

White matter is composed of bundles of insulated nerve fibers. It can be thought of as the internet of the brain, says senior author John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. “It’s the connectivity: the way that the brain communicates at some distance to orchestrate higher-level thoughts, and abilities like reading,” explains Gabrieli, who is also a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute.

The left inferior cerebellar peduncle, a white matter tract that connects the cerebellum to the brainstem and spinal cord. Image: Steven Meisler

Long-distance connections

To visualize white matter and study its structure, neuroscientists use an imaging technique called diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Images are collected in an MRI scanner by tracking the movements of water molecules in the brain. A key measure used to interpret these images is fractional anisotropy (FA), which varies with many physical features of nerve fibers, such as their density, diameter, and degree of insulation. Although FA does not measure any of these properties directly, it is considered an indicator of structural integrity within white matter tracts.

Several studies have found the FA of one or more white matter tracts to be lower in children with low reading scores or dyslexia than in children with stronger reading abilities. But those studies are small—usually involving only a few dozen children—and their findings are inconsistent. So it has been difficult to attribute reading problems to poor connections between specific parts of the brain.

Hoping to glean more conclusive results, Gabrieli and Steven Meisler, a graduate student in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology who is completing his doctoral work in the Gabrieli lab, turned to a large collection of high-quality brain images available through the Child Mind Institute’s Healthy Brain Network. Using DWI images collected from 686 children and state-of-the-art methods of analysis, they assessed the FA of 20 white matter tracts that are thought to be important for reading.

The children represented in the dataset had diverse reading abilities, but surprisingly, when they compared children with and without reading disability, Meisler and Gabrieli found no significant differences in the FA of any of the 20 tracts. Nor did they find any correlation between white matter FA and children’s overall reading scores.

More detailed analysis did link reading ability to the FA of two particular white matter tracts. The researchers only detected the correlation when they narrowed their analysis to children older than eight, who are usually reading to learn, rather than learning to read. Within this group, they found two white matter tracts whose FA was lower in children who struggled with a specific reading skill: reading “pseudowords.” The ability to read nonsense words is used to assess knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds, since real words can be recognized instead through experience and memory.

The right superior longitudinal fasciculus, a white matter tract that connects frontal brain regions to parietal areas. The research team found that fractional anisotropy (FA) of the right superior longitudinal fasciculus and the left inferior cerebellar peduncles (shown above) correlated positively with pseudoword reading ability among children ages 9 and older. Image: Steven Meisler

The first of these tracts connects language processing centers in the frontal and parietal brain regions. The other contains fibers that connect that the brainstem with the cerebellum, and may help control the eye movements needed to see and track words. The FA differences that Meisler and Gabrieli linked to reading scores were small, and it’s not yet clear what they mean. Since less cohesive structure in these two tracts was linked to lower pseudoword-reading scores only in older children, it may be a consequence of living with a reading disability rather than a cause, Meisler says.

The findings don’t rule out a role for white matter structure in reading disability, but they do suggest that researchers will need a different approach to find relevant features. “Our results suggest that FA does not relate to reading abilities as much as previously thought,” Meisler says. In future studies, he says, researchers will likely need to take advantage of more advanced methods of image analysis to assess features that more directly reflect white matter’s ability to serve as a conduit of information.

The craving state

by Jennifer Michalowski |

This story originally appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of BrainScan.

***

For people struggling with substance use disorders — and there are about 35 million of them worldwide — treatment options are limited. Even among those who seek help, relapse is common. In the United States, an epidemic of opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency.

A 2019 survey found that 1.6 million people nationwide had an opioid use disorder, and the crisis has surged since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdose between April 2020 and April 2021 — nearly 30 percent more overdose deaths than occurred during the same period the previous year.

In the United States, an epidemic of opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency.

A deeper understanding of what addiction does to the brain and body is urgently needed to pave the way to interventions that reliably release affected individuals from its grip. At the McGovern Institute, researchers are turning their attention to addiction’s driving force: the deep, recurring craving that makes people prioritize drug use over all other wants and needs.

McGovern Institute co-founder, Lore Harp McGovern.

“When you are in that state, then it seems nothing else matters,” says McGovern Investigator Fan Wang. “At that moment, you can discard everything: your relationship, your house, your job, everything. You only want the drug.”

With a new addiction initiative catalyzed by generous gifts from Institute co-founder Lore Harp McGovern and others, McGovern scientists with diverse expertise have come together to begin clarifying the neurobiology that underlies the craving state. They plan to dissect the neural transformations associated with craving at every level — from the drug-induced chemical changes that alter neuronal connections and activity to how these modifications impact signaling brain-wide. Ultimately, the McGovern team hopes not just to understand the craving state, but to find a way to relieve it — for good.

“If we can understand the craving state and correct it, or at least relieve a little bit of the pressure,” explains Wang, who will help lead the addiction initiative, “then maybe we can at least give people a chance to use their top-down control to not take the drug.”

The craving cycle

For individuals suffering from substance use disorders, craving fuels a cyclical pattern of escalating drug use. Following the euphoria induced by a drug like heroin or cocaine, depression sets in, accompanied by a drug craving motivated by the desire to relieve that suffering. And as addiction progresses, the peaks and valleys of this cycle dip lower: the pleasant feelings evoked by the drug become weaker, while the negative effects a person experiences in its absence worsen. The craving remains, and increasing use of the drug are required to relieve it.

By the time addiction sets in, the brain has been altered in ways that go beyond a drug’s immediate effects on neural signaling.

These insidious changes leave individuals susceptible to craving — and the vulnerable state endures. Long after the physical effects of withdrawal have subsided, people with substance use disorders can find their craving returns, triggered by exposure to a small amount of the drug, physical or social cues associated with previous drug use, or stress. So researchers will need to determine not only how different parts of the brain interact with one another during craving and how individual cells and the molecules within them are affected by the craving state — but also how things change as addiction develops and progresses.

Circuits, chemistry and connectivity

One clear starting point is the circuitry the brain uses to control motivation. Thanks in part to decades of research in the lab of McGovern Investigator Ann Graybiel, neuroscientists know a great deal about how these circuits learn which actions lead to pleasure and which lead to pain, and how they use that information to establish habits and evaluate the costs and benefits of complex decisions.

Graybiel’s work has shown that drugs of abuse strongly activate dopamine-responsive neurons in a part of the brain called the striatum, whose signals promote habit formation. By increasing the amount of dopamine that neurons release, these drugs motivate users to prioritize repeated drug use over other kinds of rewards, and to choose the drug in spite of pain or other negative effects. Her group continues to investigate the naturally occurring molecules that control these circuits, as well as how they are hijacked by drugs of abuse.

Distribution of opioid receptors targeted by morphine (shown in blue) in two regions in the dorsal striatum and nucleus accumbens of the mouse brain. Image: Ann Graybiel

In Fan Wang’s lab, work investigating the neural circuits that mediate the perception of physical pain has led her team to question the role of emotional pain in craving. As they investigated the source of pain sensations in the brain, they identified neurons in an emotion-regulating center called the central amygdala that appear to suppress physical pain in animals. Now, Wang wants to know whether it might be possible to modulate neurons involved in emotional pain to ameliorate the negative state that provokes drug craving.

These animal studies will be key to identifying the cellular and molecular changes that set the brain up for recurring cravings. And as McGovern scientists begin to investigate what happens in the brains of rodents that have been trained to self-administer addictive drugs like fentanyl or cocaine, they expect to encounter tremendous complexity.

McGovern Associate Investigator Polina Anikeeva, whose lab has pioneered new technologies that will help the team investigate the full spectrum of changes that underlie craving, says it will be important to consider impacts on the brain’s chemistry, firing patterns, and connectivity. To that end, multifunctional research probes developed in her lab will be critical to monitoring and manipulating neural circuits in animal models.

Imaging technology developed by investigator Ed Boyden will also enable nanoscale protein visualization brain-wide. An important goal will be to identify a neural signature of the craving state. With such a signal, researchers can begin to explore how to shut off that craving — possibly by directly modulating neural signaling.

Targeted treatments

“One of the reasons to study craving is because it’s a natural treatment point,” says McGovern Associate Investigator Alan Jasanoff. “And the dominant kind of approaches that people in our team think about are approaches that relate to neural circuits — to the specific connections between brain regions and how those could be changed.” The hope, he explains, is that it might be possible to identify a brain region whose activity is disrupted during the craving state, then use clinical brain stimulation methods to restore normal signaling — within that region, as well as in other connected parts of the brain.

To identify the right targets for such a treatment, it will be crucial to understand how the biology uncovered in laboratory animals reflects what’s happens in people with substance use disorders. Functional imaging in John Gabrieli’s lab can help bridge the gap between clinical and animal research by revealing patterns of brain activity associated with the craving state in both humans and rodents. A new technique developed in Jasanoff’s lab makes it possible to focus on the activity between specific regions of an animal’s brain. “By doing that, we hope to build up integrated models of how information passes around the brain in craving states, and of course also in control states where we’re not experiencing craving,” he explains.

In delving into the biology of the craving state, McGovern scientists are embarking on largely unexplored territory — and they do so with both optimism and urgency. “It’s hard to not appreciate just the size of the problem, and just how devastating addiction is,” says Anikeeva. “At this point, it just seems almost irresponsible to not work on it, especially when we do have the tools and we are interested in the general brain regions that are important for that problem. I would say that there’s almost a civic duty.”

Having more conversations to boost brain development

by Jennifer Michalowski |

Engaging children in more conversation may be all it takes to strengthen language processing networks in their brains, according to a new study by MIT scientists.

Childhood experiences, including language exposure, have a profound impact on the brain’s development. Now, scientists led by McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli have shown that when families change their communication style to incorporate more back-and-forth exchanges between child and adult, key brain regions grow and children’s language abilities advance. Other parts of the brain may be impacted, as well.

In a study of preschool and kindergarten-aged children and their families, Gabrieli, Harvard postdoctoral researcher Rachel Romeo, and colleagues found that increasing conversation had a measurable impact on children’s brain structure and cognition within just a few months. “In just nine weeks, fluctuations in how often parents spoke with their kids appear to make a difference in brain development, language development, and executive function development,” Gabrieli says. The team’s findings are reported in the June issue of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

“We’re excited because this adds a little more evidence to the idea that [the brain] is malleable,” adds Romeo, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College Park.

“It suggests that in a relatively short period of time, the brain can change in positive ways,” says Romeo.

30 million word gap

In the 1990s, researchers determined that there are dramatic discrepancies in the language that children are exposed to early in life. They found that children from high-income families heard about 30 million more words during their first three years than children from lower-income families—and those exposed to more language tended to do better on tests of language development, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

In 2018, Gabrieli and Romeo found that it was not the volume of language that made a difference, however, but instead the extent to which children were engaged in conversation. They measured this by counting the number of “conversational turns” that children experienced over a few days—that is, the frequency with which dialogue switched between child and adult. When they compared the brains of children who experienced significantly different levels of these conversational turns, they found structural and functional differences in regions known to be involved in language and speech.

After observing these differences, the researchers wanted to know whether altering a child’s language environment would impact their brain’s future development. To find out, they enrolled the families of fifty-two children between the ages of four and seven in a study, and randomly assigned half of the families to participate in a nine-week parent training program. While the program did not focus exclusively on language, there was an emphasis on improving communication, and parents were encouraged to engage in meaningful dialogues with their children.

Romeo and colleagues sent families home with audio recording devices to capture all of the language children were exposed to over two full days, first at the outset of the program and again after the nine-week training was complete. When they analyzed the recordings, they found that in many families, conversation between children and their parents had increased—and children who experienced the greatest increase in conversational turns showed the greatest improvements in language skills as well as in executive functions—a set of skills that includes memory, attention, and self-control.

 

graph depicting cortical changes
Clusters where changes in cortical thickness are significantly correlated with changes in children’s experienced conversational turns. Scatterplots represent the average change in cortical thickness as a function of the pre-to-post changes in conversational turns.

MRI scans showed that over the nine-week study, these children also experienced the most growth in two key brain areas: a sound processing center called the supramarginal gyrus and a region involved in language processing and speech production called Broca’s area. Intriguingly, these areas are very close to parts of the brain involved in executive function and social cognition.

“The brain networks for executive functioning, language, and social cognition are deeply intertwined and going through these really important periods of development during this preschool and transition-to-school period,” Romeo says. “Conversational turns seem to be going beyond just linguistic information. They seem to be about human communication and cognition at a deeper level. I think the brain results are suggestive of that, because there are so many language regions that could pop out, but these happen to be language regions that also are associated with other cognitive functions.”

Talk more

Gabrieli and Romeo say they are interested in exploring simple ways—such a web or smartphone-based tools—to support parents in communicating with their children in ways that foster brain development. It’s particularly exciting, Gabrieli notes, that introducing more conversation can impact brain development when at the age when children are preparing to begin school.

“Kids who arrive to school school-ready in language skills do better in school for years to come,” Gabrieli says. “So I think it’s really exciting to be able to see that the school readiness is so flexible and dynamic in nine weeks of experience.”

“We know this is not a trivial ask of people,” he says. “There’s a lot of factors that go into people’s lives— their own prior experiences, the pressure of their circumstances. But it’s a doable thing. You don’t have to have an expensive tutor or some deluxe pre-K environment. You can just talk more with your kid.”