Casey in our East Bay, California office shared these snippets from a podcast with Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist at University of British Columbia, who studies child psychology and specifically the importance of the development of the prefrontal cortex:
“But our research and others’ is showing that if the children have more time to play, they do better on these academic outcome measures than if they spend more time in direct academic instruction. And things like the arts or sports or any of these other things, they develop your cognitive skills dependent on prefrontal cortex. Like sustaining attention, like being able to hold information in mind. They speak to your social aspect because you’re part of a group.”
“It turns out […] being able to exercise discipline, and keep at it, and practice, and study, and finish your assignments, and start your assignments when you need to — is much more important than IQ. Which is kind of hopeful because then you don’t have to worry, you know, ‘Gee, I wasn’t born with this high IQ so I can’t achieve.’ And the evidence is that that’s not so.“