Why Can't Johnny Draw Arms and Legs

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Why Can’t Johnny Draw Arms And Legs?

The really great thing about being a psychiatrist is that

knowledge about the brain

keepschanging and increasing.Researchers in Spain, Colombia, and Britain worked together to do some really slick andclever research about how the brain works to get people to read. They looked at the brains of (gorillas) who had recently learned to read and the brains of illiterate people andare able to locate reading skills in a place called the angular gyrus of the left, generallydominant hemisphere.But we are not talking about simple reading skills here. We are talking about a certainability to predict what is coming next when reading. Perhaps a familiarity, perhaps anability to generalize from what one has read before to what one is likely to be reading inthe present or future.Of course there will be cries of “we have to do more research” and “we can’t infer toomuch from this” but that is one reason I am not a full time researcher. Like onealternative practitioner friend says often, “You don’t need research to tell if there is anose on your face.”I recently saw a local educational television report on the community of Tar Creek,Oklahoma, where an observant schoolteacher saw children were not becoming all thatthey could be, and called some public health folks at Harvard. Tar Creek has hills called“chat” hills that are built from mine waste. Not only does the original mine waste stillexist, but people have had many a pleasant picnic sitting on top of the “chat” hills.

Thisis the project

that resulted from that call to Harvard: Now we may not be exactly sure how heavy metals affect the developing brain, or if they preferentially hit the part relevant to reading.

But even a naive non medical site about heavy metal toxicity

has grasped an obvious point.

Children are smaller and have less cells, so anything that happens to be toxic is probablymore likely to affect the brains of children than the brains of adult folks.Moreover, heavy metal poisoning has been postulated to be related to, for example,autistic spectrum disorders. (Children who have them are not expected to be at anappropriate reading level for their age, among lots of other symptoms.)Put it all together and what we are really saying is that things that may have been treatedwith teaching and training, like reading problems, ranging from dyslexia to illiteracy,may be brain problems.And even if it is not possible for us at this stage to isolate specific brain chemicals thatare necessary for these functions, we may be able to do a very good job of identifying brain chemicals that may be culprits that mess up these functions.The same educational television show that talked about the project in Tar Creek,Oklahoma talked about pesticide exposure in mothers and their young offspring in(would you believe) New York City.I can believe, although my exposure to that city has been limited, that people are areusing pesticides in small apartments to kill all manner of pests, and that mothers andchildren are exposed to them.At the time that the television report was made, none of the children studied were over three years old. Children who had not been exposed to pesticides drew seemingly age-appropriate drawings of humans that had a head, two arms, and two legs. Children whohad been exposed to pesticides did drawings where neither arms nor legs nor heads wererecognizable. At least 70% of them.You don’t need to do research to find out that you have a nose on your face.There is a part of the brain that has to develop appropriately for children to read well, asthere are other parts of the brain that have to develop in order for children to make arepresentation of the human body that includes arms and legs. In our cavalier development of industries that produce toxins, we are somehow doing something bad for our own brains, but definitely doing something horrible to the more fragile, moresusceptible, brains of children.We could always wait until they get older and have diagnosable psychiatric illnesses wecan find in the venerated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). Then we couldtreat them with psychotropic drugs! Now I can’t say exactly how much of the adult psychiatric problems we see have something to do with exposures to toxins. But I cansay they are doing something. Trying to do something to limit known environmental

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