A Complete Brain Discovery Program For Children Based on Real Neuroscience

     I’m Tim Brown and I'm a developmental cognitive neurophysiologist and pediatric neuropsychologist. For more than 30 years now, I’ve been doing something called brain mapping. I’ve spent my career studying the functional organization of human brains and how it relates to cognitive and behavioral abilities and development. I've used essentially every brain scanning tool and brain activity recording method available to map all sorts of cognitive functions in infants, children, adolescents, and adults. These have included positron emission tomography (PET), electroencephalography (EEG), structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (f/MRI), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and other methods. And I’ve used these tools to study individual differences across all kinds of minds and brains, from typical development through the whole range of neurodiversity. I’ve studied children in school classrooms and have worked clinically with kids with a wide variety of formal diagnoses, including attention and executive function disorders, autism, developmental language disorders, learning disabilities, neurological diseases and early brain damage, sensory processing issues, intellectual disabilities, and genetic disorders. Working with children for this long in clinics, schools, and research settings, I’ve been privileged to see up close the incredible neurodevelopmental variation they display!

     I love children’s activity books! I think they’re a great way to promote many important aspects of healthy brain and cognitive development. And honestly, in this new era of passive digital distraction, I think it has become especially important for children to spend as much brain time as possible engaged in the kind of mindful, active learning and enjoyment that comes from books. But I haven’t seen any activity books for kids that are based on a genuinely scientific approach to how their developing minds and brains work and how they best learn and grow. So I wanted to do my part!

     I made this activity book myself from beginning to end. You'll notice that it's pretty different from other activity books. That’s on purpose.

     The activities I’ve created for this book are based directly on my personal scientific knowledge and experience with kids of all brain types and developmental levels. Heavily informed by my own published research, the activities I’ve created here are intended to be fun, challenging, and edifying for children across a wide range of ages and educational levels, with an emphasis on children who are progressing from learning to read to reading to learn.

     Neurons, Activate! begins by briefly introducing children to a few simple facts and concepts about their powerful living, developing brain. For the purposes of organization and simplification for young readers, I’ve categorized the brain’s main working parts into five functional systems that I’ve called the Front Brain, Back Brain, Top Brain, Side Brain, and Little Brain. These labels correspond anatomically to the frontal, occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes and the cerebellum, respectively.

     After a brief introduction to brains and to the five major brain systems, the activities follow. The 50 neuron-activating brain activities that I’ve created for this book are designed to engage multiple brain systems and to each focus on two of the five different functional systems as the child uses them. These activities elicit a multitude of important mental processing operations from kids, such as attention and executive functions, visual-spatial processing, language comprehension and speech production, non-speech auditory processing, concept formation, writing, temporal-sequential ordering, fine and gross motor functions, social interaction, sensory-motor integration, reading and math skills, and different kinds of short- and long-term memory and learning. I’ve studied all of the brain regions, structures, and connections that are involved in these functions in children. So I’ve designed these activities to specifically activate each of these important and still-developing cognitive neural systems. 

     I've ordered the activities to build on one another and to somewhat increase in sophistication developmentally as children work from Activity #1 to #50. However, they can just as easily and validly be completed by skipping around in any order to follow a child’s personal preferences, a parent’s priorities, or a teacher’s or therapist’s educational or therapeutic goals. And they are encouraged to be re-performed repeatedly like favorites in a playlist! 

     I tried to make as many activities work as I could without yielding final outcomes that render them too repetitive, predictable, or useless after the child does them once. My lack of a comprehensive answer key at the end is also intended to encourage repeated use, ambiguity tolerance, and increased confidence in children's own judgments and decisions about correctness. I want to encourage less concreteness and emphasize the process over the end point, while still giving the child a sense of accomplishment for each activity. I have used a broad range of outcome types, time on task, and difficulty (from very easy to quite hard). Some of the activities are quick to finish, while others require much more time. Some will be challenging even for adults. And your kids will be better at doing some of these things than you and I are! Overall, I really hope this book can serve as a useful long-term resource and reference during a child's elementary school years. 

     I have to admit, I think it’s pretty cool that we now know enough about how young brains work that we can teach kids how different activities engage specific regions of their brains! But I’m hoping children get even more than just this from using Neurons, Activate! 

The part of this book that I’m most excited about is helping kids with all kinds of minds learn more about how their brains work in a way that will increase their personal understanding and provide new cognitive mechanisms that they (and the adults in their lives) can leverage to meet challenges and realize their full neurodevelopmental potential. Engaging in a specific activity while simultaneously learning about what’s happening in your brain during that task can be a genuinely novel and impactful learning experience for children. It's a brain-behavior learning loop! 

     This form of metacognitive scaffolding is designed to build a child’s self-awareness of their own mental and behavioral processes in real time. From what scientists call an embodied neurocognitive perspective, these activities can help kids learn the specific mind states and bodily feelings that are associated with using specific brain systems. Kids gain a new form of understanding tied to newly learned terms and ideas that they can thereafter reflect on and talk about. In clinical settings and research in schools, I’ve tested different ways of doing this, and the results have been quite positive, especially for kids grappling with specific neurodevelopmental challenges that require cognitive-behavioral adaptations. Insight about how your own specific brain systems work can become a powerful and fun tool for all children! 

     If I were seeing a child clinically, it would be a big missed opportunity to have them complete lots of tasks and activities without attempting to provide some sort of summary characterization based on all their work. Behavior is an incredibly sensitive measure of brain function. So I’ve designed this activity book to also serve as an assessment of sorts that I hope you’ll find informative and useful. For each activity kids complete, in addition to learning about the brain systems and cognitive processes it involves, they are also asked to rate how enjoyable and how difficult they found that task immediately after doing it.

     At the end of the book, these ratings can be tallied to produce a simple profile analysis of that child’s overall attitudes, affinities, propensities, and preferences that relate to using each of the five brain systems they’ve been activating and learning about. This personal brain activity preference profile reveals which types of cognitive tasks and behavioral activities that child rated as most (and least) enjoyable and easiest (and most difficult) overall in the course of completing this book. As I know you would expect, these ratings will yield different results for different children! 

     This profile calculation is certainly not in any way a formal psychometric assessment or clinical diagnosis. It does not include any objective measures of cognitive performance or skill level in relation to age-matched norms or expectations like we would conduct clinically. This is a very simple tally of which activities the child subjectively found most often to be fun and most often easy. Nevertheless, it does provide a simple and interpretationally straightforward characterization of the child’s neurocognitive activity preferences that might inform their self-understanding and could serve as useful information in their ongoing learning and development. I conclude Neurons, Activate! with a section for adults that provides some guidelines for thinking about how a child’s preference profile might best be interpreted and utilized by parents, teachers, therapists, and kids themselves. I encourage adults to use it to engage kids in talking and thinking about their brains!

     One final note. With the exception of this introduction and the profile section intended for adults, this activity book is written at a reading level and style intended for children about 8 to 12 years of age. At any given age or grade level, there is wide individual differences variability across children in their cognitive skill levels and in what they are currently ready to learn. Most children in this age range will be able to use this book independently. And the activities can be readily performed and enjoyed by younger children as well, with adult guidance. I'm hoping that some parents, teachers, and therapists will use this activity book for working with kids individually and in classroom and therapeutic group settings.

     For those interested in the details, I have computed several age, grade, and readability metrics that are used by developmental professionals. These were calculated based on the sections of the book intended specifically for children to read and use.  

     The Lexile index for the child sections ranges from 600L to 700L (average ~650L), corresponding to a 3rd grade to 4th grade independent reading level and an instructional/supported level for children younger than this. This score reflects writing that is simple enough structurally to prevent cognitive fatigue during multi-step activities, yet advanced enough semantically to introduce new, rather subtle concepts to school-age children. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 81.57 (Easy To Read), and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 4.5. These suggest the text is highly accessible, conversational, and structurally optimized for a mid-elementary school reading level. Children have smaller working memory capacities than adults. By keeping the average sentence length low, the text ensures a child doesn't forget the beginning of an instruction or concept by the time they reach the period. The syntax and grammar are also kept simple, which frees up cognitive space for young readers to learn and absorb new terms and concepts when they appear.

     Please let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear from you and your kids on what you like, dislike, and want to see in the next activity book! Email me any time at tim@neuronsactivate.com. And let me know if you have any questions. Thanks very much for trying out the book and for encouraging the children you care about to learn about their growing, working brains!

With much appreciation,

Tim

Tim Brown, Ph.D.

Department of Neurosciences

University of California, San Diego

School of Medicine