and many of them have been rejected by the school system. They leave Arrowsmith transformed. One of the results of my visits to the school was that I became determined to help spread the news of what is possible with brain training and share the Arrowsmith methods with our army of teachers and parents who follow youcubed (they call themselves youcubians). As mentioned, the approach of special education in schools has been to identify students’ weaknesses and teach around them, essentially teaching to their strengths. Arrowsmith’s approach is the opposite. The teachers work to identify brain weaknesses and then teach to them—building up the brain pathways and connections that students need. My hope is that all students with learning differences will be exposed to brain training and freed from the labels and limits they have been forced to live with, replacing these instead with hope engendered by a transformed brain.
Many amazing individuals who were written off and told not to pursue particular studies have excelled in them. Dylan Lynn was diagnosed as having dyscalculia, a particular brain condition that makes learning mathematics hard. But Dylan refused to accept that she could not learn math and pursued and achieved a degree in statistics. She did this by refusing to listen to all the people who told her to drop her mathematics courses, instead working out her own approach to mathematics. Dylan now collaborates with Katherine Lewis, a professor at the University of Washington, in telling her story to inspire other learners who were told they could not achieve their desired goal.16
It is time to recognize that we cannot label children and have low expectations for them. This is true regardless of any diagnosed learning difference. As we ourselves are learning in these pages, the most notable quality of our brains is their adaptability and potential for changing and growing.
In addition to children with genuine learning disabilities, many other students are either told or made to believe they have a learning disability when they do not—particularly when it comes to mathematics. For decades, teachers everywhere have identified children who do not memorize math facts as well as their classmates and labeled them as having a deficiency or disability.
One study, conducted by neuroscientist Teresa Iuculano and her colleagues at Stanford School of Medicine, clearly shows the potential of children’s brains to grow and change as well as the danger of misdiagnosing students.17 The researchers brought in children from two groups—one group had been diagnosed as having mathematical learning disabilities and the other consisted of regular performers. The researchers used MRI scans to look at the brains of the children when they were working on math. They found actual brain differences. This is where it gets interesting. The difference was that the students identified as having disabilities had more brain regions lighting up when they worked on a math problem.
This result is counterintuitive, for many people think that students with “special needs” have less going on in their brains, not more. However, we do not want all of the brain lighting up when we work on mathematics; we want a few focused areas to light up. The researchers dug further and gave one-on-one tutoring to both sets of students—those who were regular performers and those identified as having a mathematical learning disability. At the end of the eight weeks of tutoring, not only did both sets of students have the same achievement; they also had the exact same brain areas lighting up.
This is one of many important studies showing that after a short period of time—research interventions are often eight weeks long—brains can be completely changed and rewired. The “learning disabled” students in this study developed their brains to an extent that allowed them to function in the same way as “regular performers.” Let’s hope they returned to school and lost their “mathematical disability” labels. Just imagine how everything could change for those young children in school and in life.
High-Achieving Students
The importance of knowing about brain growth is not limited to students diagnosed with learning differences. It extends across the entire achievement spectrum. Students come to Stanford with a history of school success; often they have only ever received As in school. But when they struggle in their first math (or any other) class, many decide they cannot learn the subject and give up.
As mentioned, for the last several years I have been working to dispel these ideas with students by teaching a class called “How to Learn Math.” The class integrates the positive neuroscience of learning with a new way of seeing and experiencing math. My experience of teaching this class has been eye-opening. I have met so many undergrads who are extremely vulnerable and too readily come to believe they don’t belong in STEM subjects. Unfortunately, they are almost always women and people of color. It is not hard to understand why these groups are more vulnerable than white males. The stereotypes that pervade our society based on gender and color run deep and communicate that women and people of color are not suited to STEM subjects.
One study published in the premier journal Science showed this powerfully.18 Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian and colleagues interviewed university professors in different subject areas to see how prevalent the idea of a “gift” was—the concept that you need a special ability to be successful in a particular field. Their results were staggering. They found that the more prevalent the idea of a gift was in any academic field, the fewer women and people of color were in that field. This held across all thirty subjects they looked at. The following graphs show the relationships the researchers uncovered; the top chart (A) shows the science and technology subjects, and the chart below (B) shows the arts and humanities subjects.
The question I always ask when I see data like this is: If the idea of giftedness is harmful to adults to this extent, what does it do to young children?
The idea of giftedness is not only inaccurate and damaging; it is gender and racially biased. We have many different forms of evidence showing that those who believe in fixed brains and giftedness also believe that boys, men, and certain racial groups are gifted and girls, women, and other racial groups are not.
One of the forms of evidence that shows this clearly was collected by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who focused his attention on google searches.19 His study revealed something very interesting and disturbing. He found that the most commonly googled word following “Is my two-year-old son …” is “gifted.” He also found that parents search the words “Is my son gifted?” two and a half times more than the words “Is my daughter gifted?” This is despite the fact that young children of different genders have equal potential.
Sadly, the problem is not limited to parents. Daniel Storage and his colleagues conducted analyses of anonymous reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, and they found that students were twice as likely to call male rather than female professors “brilliant” and three times as likely to call male rather than female professors “geniuses.”20 These and other studies show that ideas of giftedness and genius are intertwined with racist and sexist assumptions.
I am convinced that the majority of people who have gender or racial biases do not think about them consciously or perhaps even realize they have them. I also contend that if we were to dispel the idea that some people are “naturally” gifted and instead recognize that everyone is on a growth journey and can achieve amazing things, some of the most insidious biases against women and people of color would disappear. This is needed in the STEM fields more than anywhere else; it is no coincidence that STEM subjects evidence the strongest fixed thinking and the starkest inequities in participation.
Part of the reason so many students are dissuaded from thinking they are capable of learning math is the attitudes of the teachers and professors who teach them. I have now met a few amazing mathematicians who devote large parts of their lives to dispelling the elitist ideas that pervade mathematics. University mathematician Piper Harron, one of my own heroes, is one of those people. On her website, called The Liberated Mathematician, she writes: “My view of mathematics is that it is an absolute mess which actively pushes out the sort of people who might make it better. I have no patience for genius pretenders. I want to empower the people.”21 It is wonderful to have voices like Piper’s to help dispel the myths about who can achieve in mathematics.
Unfortunately, there remain