Gunnar – attention

And one of the new frontiers now of course is we just can’t keep finding out that the early experiences matter, and that you can be in deep trouble if you don’t have supportive early experiences. We have to try to figure out what to do about it. And the attention area is one where I think people are going to make the biggest headway, sort of the soonest. Because we’re beginning to understand a fair amount about interventions that improve your ability to focus, your ability to attend. And there are a number of different programs out there that are working on areas like this. So there’s the, what is it, Tools of the Mind, Adele Diamond has studied that, and you are improving attention and attention regulation with some of those kinds of activities. 

So, there’s a lot of interest out there, one of the things that folks are looking at is yoga; mindfulness meditation – the kind you would do with kids – which is really about focusing, calming, etcetera. So they’re trying things like that. Do we know what to do yet? No, there’s a lot of activity out there of doing what we call pilot work, the initial, so you get an idea. It might work. We tried some mindfulness training in the preschool down here last summer and it improved executive function. It improved their attention over, I couldn’t believe it. Now you’ve got that data, you’ve got to go back to NIH and say, “Okay, we’ve got some evidence now, can we do a randomized trial in a larger scale to see if it actually works?” And can we try it with children who have more difficulties etcetera. So, it’s a new horizon.