Despite falling SAT scores and employers reporting that high-school grads can’t run the cash register, researchers, educators, and parents each have some pieces of the puzzle of how children learn best. But somehow, all these experts don’t always share what they know.

Consider the power of playful learning. While research shows that unstructured play promotes attention and critical thinking skills and exercise can reduce stress and help prevent obesity, some schools are dropping recess and cutting back on playtime. At home, some parents equate playtime with wasted time, even though imaginative play, like planning and holding a pretend tea party, helps children practice social conversation and completing tasks in order.

How do we change their minds? That’s the task the Learning Resources Network, or L_rn, has taken on. Its first big project was the highly successful Ultimate Block Party in New York’s Central Park last fall; event planners expected a few thousand families and instead drew more than 50,000. Even The New York Times took notice, albeit a few months later. Local leaders repeated its success recently in Toronto, and on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 2, Baltimore Public Schools will host the third party, on Rash field in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

“We want to share the science,” said Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of the University of Delaware during a forum on the project on Wednesday. “We know how kids learn best; it’s out there, it’s not a secret anymore.”

This four-minute video from last year tells their story, from problems to solutions:

“We want to show the science of learning through play,” said L-rn’s Publisher Susan Magsamen of Johns Hopkins University during a forum on Wednesday. The Ultimate Block Party is an application of these principles in the real world, and next month the group will launch an application in the virtual world, the Web portal l-rn.com.

Even though I’m not a kid anymore, I’m planning to go to the party in Baltimore. Learning is lifelong, after all. And, as I wrote for the Baltimore magazine Urbanite back in 2006, many of us, of all ages, could use more play in our lives.

First: WOW. I’d been to quite a few lectures in the LoC before, but always come in the back entrance, so I’d never seen the entry hall. Gorgeous! Here’s Virginia in the hall shining a light on the two figures bookending an entry arch: A young reader and an old reader, showing that learning is a life-long pursuit.

The entry has staircases on two sides, and along the railings are putti dressed as different sorts of artisans. Here is one (left) dressed as an 18th century printer.

I was especially interested in the imagery of printing, as that’s a topic I write about in my stories. In the hall through the double-readers doorway are a series of paintings showing the progress of text, from stone through papyrus, and on to the printing press, below. Also in this small area are display cases for two Bibles: one hand-calligraphy and one printed by Gutenberg around the same time, marking the moment everything changed for book-readers.

The entry hall has a second-floor gallery, where the printer’s marks from various famous print-shops decorate the ornamental work between the stretched-canvas paintings. Along one wing of the gallery are images depicting the different forms of literature, including (top) romance and (bottom) erotica (“Love Poetry,” according to the catalog). Erotica!

We peeked into the reading room and heard how to request a book (fill out a form, wait between a half-hour and an entire day). Now I want to find something to request.
(LOC has clearer images of Romance and Erotica)

It really fires up around the :25 mark, but watching the whole thing reminds me how much we move around when we are “sleeping quietly.” The video credit on videosift is “by Perky,” on YouTube it’s “derrobsi.” Here’s where I found it: http://videosift.com/video/Time-lapse-man-sleeping-with-cat

I wandered across it because I was looking for a poster of a famous time-lapse photo of a man sleeping with his cat that is part of J. Allan Hobson’s Dreamstage Sleep and Brain Science Museum in Vermont. I have wanted to go, but rarely (never?) get to Vermont, but now the museum has launched a virtual tour on its site, with lots of slides and audio of Hobson describing the various exhibits and the science of sleep and dreaming.

Also, I had only the vaguest sense of time – they’re wearing jeans, and they jump trains, so sometime between 1930 and now. There doesn’t seem to be a social worker when the girls drop out of school, so sometime before 1980. Does it matter? It did to me. I actually went to Wikipedia later to discover that I was supposed to know that a novel one character was reading was published in 1954, so I would then know roughly when this story takes place.

And this narrator, who dropped out of school and doesn’t show evidence of mighty reading or checking a dictionary when she does, drops words like immiscible, fenestration, lucifactions, calyx, spillet, and parturition into her story. Hearing those words in her voice was jarring for me. Part of the story is about the reader’s discovering how Ruth’s interpretations of events (“finding” the rowboat, what flooding meant for the house’s foundation) doesn’t match our interpretation (stealing the rowboat, the foundation is unsafe). That her narration uses these words makes it also untrue, as if some smart person were trying to pass herself off as this dreamy, drifty woman. These sort of words are all through the book, and each time I passed each one and wrote them on the inside back cover to look up (me, with the master’s degree in English), my faith in the narrator weakened. By the end, I thought she was a big pretender and I’m not sure what she says happened in the end really happened.

I was also put off by the “promises” the story starts with that it doesn’t keep. For example, at the start of the story there is deep detail about the narrator’s grandfather, then his grandmother and all her daughters. They are so lovingly detailed I expected we would hear more about them, but we don’t—or not all of them. One became a missionary and disappears out of the story (not even a note, that I remember). I read this over a weekend, and remember waiting to hear something later about this missionary-daughter, who was so important she got a description at the start, but never did. Why is this daughter even in the story? To paraphrase Checkov on playwriting: Don’t have a gun on the wall in Act 1 if you’re not going to fire it in Act 2.

The one that led me to close the book for the night, though, comes later:

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again.
(HOUSEKEEPING, Picador 1980, p. 111)

Argh! I just spent time picturing this dog, making her history, guessing what part she would play in the story, and she’s not in the story ever again. This is the sound of a book hitting the wall.
This is why Crip is in the story:

She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods. (p. 111)

Again, beautiful, beautiful writing. And again, unbelievable. I’m more inclined to think that the experience of being caught outside overnight with no shelter and trapped by dark dreams would be a better explanation for the “somberness.” If it wasn’t for book club, I would not have read on; I’m glad I did. But I’m not running out to pick up another of these books.

One of the many things that worked for me was the consistent imagery of water as dangerous, deadly, dark, mysterious. I know that is true—every time I step into Lake Michigan I think of all the dead mariners somewhere below—but I quickly shake off that image with my preferred view that water is life-giving, healthy, and good, and dive in. The cumulative images and descriptions in the text did a great job of persuading me to the other point of view, to a better balance.

I also liked being reminded that a person outside looking through a window at a cozy family inside is not always envious, not always wanting the same thing or anything like it.

Also, there are so many great lines: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds true workings.” (p. 116) “They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.” (p. 131) “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” (p. 159)

Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon in Baltimore, I joined a couple dozen people participating in an experiment in neuroaesthetics, helping researchers try to take a reading on what art does to our brains.

The exhibit/experiment “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics” at the Walters Art Museum is a collaboration between the museum and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University. As part of a series of experiments, Institute researchers are collecting nearly three months’ worth of museumgoer experiences and compare them with the reactions of a far smaller number of subjects on campus viewing similar shapes while they are in an fMRI brain scanner.

Outside the single gray-walled room stood a sculpture by Jean Arp, “The Woman of Delos,” finished in 1959. Inside, the two long walls each held five posters containing 25 computer-generated modifications of the work, stretching it, compressing it, re-orienting it, and taking a slice out of it.

As we entered the exhibit, we picked up 3-D glasses, pencils, a score sheet, and directions: “Look at the arrays (picture groups), fill out the answer sheet and leave your response for the scientists to analyze.” For each array, we circled the dot corresponding to the position of the shape on the poster we found “most pleasing” and marked an X over the dot for the shape we found “least pleasing.” I filled in my age and gender, and set off. With me were about 15 other “research subjects,” ranging from middle-school age to retired folks.

The directions said to stand a foot or so away from the images; younger people often stood much closer, older people a little farther away. Sometimes I needed to move forward or back or side-to-side to see the 3-D effect.

Some of the images looked to me like misshapen clown-faces, others (as in the photo) were sloping shapes a little too reminiscent of all the snow I’d been shoveling this winter. Some images seemed to be reaching out to embrace me in soft, bulbous arms; others, with sharper edges, looked more likely to slice me. Guess which ones I preferred.

The distinctions are so small, the images so similar, I had a hard time discriminating among them, and the longer I took the harder it became to decide which I truly preferred. Most of the time, I ended up choosing extremes, usually an image along the edge of the frame.

The researchers hypothesize that our basic three-dimensional shape preferences are determined in part by neuronal responses in visual regions of the brain; by collecting and aggregating a large number of responses, perhaps they hope to find the limits of our sense of aesthetic pleasure. I like the idea that artists are “intuitive neuroscientists,” as Walters director Gary Vikan puts it, but I’m not sure how much this testing will expand our knowledge.

For example, would I have answered differently if I had not seen the actual piece just before I saw all its modifications? Even as a sometime art-goer, I know that Arp pieces usually are rounded and robust; if I hadn’t known that would my choices have changed? Just before my exhibit-going, I had enjoyed a brunch with friends and was in a good mood; if I had been in a different mood, say, angry, would the “pointier” pieces have appealed to me more? My companion, who had not been to the brunch, found more flaws than I did with the experimental procedure (and liked the pointy ones better, too). 

Also, I prefer to view this Arp piece from the back, and follow the line making up its “shoulder” as it flows to form the front. I couldn’t tell for sure, but there seemed to be no views from that angle. The images on the posters were 3-D, but only from one angle; our experience is surely different as we walk around a sculpture.

On the other hand, I’m willing to be proven wrong, and the exhibit did pull a swath of non-scientists into the curious mode of scientific experimenters. What a great way to introduce neuroscience and something like the scientific method to the general public. I’ll keep an eye out for results of this research and others in the series, and, I expect, so will some of the others whose responses filled the “answer box” at the end of the day.

Try it yourself: “Beauty and the Brain” runs through April 11 at the Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays; admission is free.

[This post appeared first at the Dana Foundation blog]

Best “club” show: Classical guitar stars Duo Melis at the Northwest Hills United Methodist Church.

Best food this time: migas outside at Juanita’s (formerly a red caboose) at 1120 W. Fifth.

Best exercise: Urban Dare Austin (we came in 51st of 150-some). Close second: Frisbee challenge in Wii Sports Resort.

Best stroll: Along Lady Bird Lake/river, where I saw this statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his double shadow, as well as a log-full of turtles.

Yesterday, just to break up the monotony of steadily falling snowflakes, we had windstorms, too. And Monday may again bring snow. Good thing the house is full of books.