I happened on this book in the library about how attention and intuition work. (I won't give the title till the end of the post, because you may first want to test yourself on the video here first.)
That was just for fun. But the book also contained two things related to therapies we might consider with Liam.
One: the whole MMR controversy. Does the MMR vaccine cause autism? It's administered shortly before the age that autism is usually diagnosed. When people started fearing it, the information came out in the UK, which showed a decline in vaccination rates; but autism rates stayed consistent with the US rates, where vaccination was continuing as before. Later studies showed that omitting the vaccination had no effect on the likelihood of diagnosing autism.
Yet people still fear the vaccine, because of stories: "I had my baby vaccinated, and in a couple of months she showed signs of autism." Would you want to take the chance?
The same thing with things like TNI (Targeted Nutritional Intervention). "After adding TNI, my child learned things he'd never had before." (As children of that age tend to.) Maybe there's something to it. The only study I could find online showed no benefit to DS infants from TNI; but it's hard to measure things with infants. Maybe they should have tried with children further along.
And... the Mozart effect.
Ruascher et al, in October 1993 Nature, revealed results of an experiment showing that college students did better on IQ tests after listening to Mozart.
Thus we have Baby Mozart, Baby Einstein (since shown actually to correlate with poorer infant performance in tests, for whatever reason), and . . . nobody else has been able to duplicate the original results. Trials by someone named Steele led to a press release: 'Mozart Effect' De-Bunked; quickly changed to 'Mozart Effect' Challenged, after one of the original authors threatened a lawsuit. So much for the pristine reliability of peer review.
But research continued, showing teens did better on tests after listening to pop music, rather than Mozart. I wouldn't put too much in that. The next test may show they do better after watching South Park. But if Mozart makes you smarter, why can't we consistently measure it?
And while studies on teens and adults debunked the idea, Mozart for babies was taking off.
It feels right. Mozart is highbrow. It makes me feel oh so cultured to listen to it. We hear it as background music for documentaries about history and art and culture, but rarely for body-count movies. We've trained ourselves to associate it with smarts just as we've trained ourselves to associate the Linus and Lucy theme with Peanuts.
So the Mozart Effect will live on, even if it has no effect on intelligence.
And we'll do Sudoku to ward off Alzheimer's (it really annoys me that nobody's been able to show a link for that either). Does this impact the therapies we do for DS children?
It does seem that Sudoku doesn't help you remember people's names and crosswords don't help you solve Sudoku. (Sudoku does help you solve Sudoku-like problems like Kakuro, though.) If we want Liam to learn his ABC's, we'll have to teach him his ABC's. If we want him to read, he'll need books. If we want him to walk, that shopping-cart-like toy we have for him does seem wise; because he's walking, just with support.
My hope for Liam is that he will learn to spend a lot of time doing the things that are good for his development. If he wants to listen to Mozart at the same time, fine by me . . . but I won't expect Mozart to help him learn to count. Just to help him learn to appreciate music.
The book is The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.
The book is The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.