Brainiacs

Brain research has been getting a lot of attention these days. Newsmagazines have made celebrities of neuroscientists, popularizing their studies with glossy feature treatments and slick, authoritative-looking CT scans. Politicians and advocates of early childhood education, meanwhile, are trumpeting brain studies as justification for new policies and funding.

While this fanfare may feed the egos of brain researchers, it worries them, too. According to some scientists, brain research is being oversimplified, misinterpreted, and, most troubling, misapplied. In particular, they are concerned that far too much has been made of their tentative findings about the importance of brain growth during the first three years of life. Though these early years are certainly vital to a child’s development, the latest research indicates that the brain continues to develop in critical ways throughout childhood and into early adolescence.

An important study published recently in the journal Nature hammered home this point. Using magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain development, scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles, the National Institute of Mental Health, and McGill University in Montreal found that the brain continues to change structurally through age 15. During the early years, from ages 3 to 6, most brain growth occurs in the “frontal circuits,” an area related to organization and planning. But as children get older, the researchers say, growth continues in the rear of the brain, which has been linked to language...