Shichida in English - book review Children Can Change through Right Brain Edu...

[GeniusExperiment]

I've always tried to find more Shichida resources in English on the web but found them very limited (apart from a few fantastic blogs), so I ordered both his books on right brain education in English because all available resources on the web seem to be in Japanese or Mandarin. I want to provide very detailed summaries of the books in English on my blog so others don't need to order the books from Japan, saving you thousands of yen :-)!

The first review is ready, it's of Children Can Change through Right Brain Education. You can find it here:

http://www.geniusexperiment.com/2013/07/shichida-right-brain-education/

Overall, I would have wished for more detail about exercises and research but I think he gives just enough detail to make you want to attend Shichida Academy but not enough to replace the courses, and that's why you don't actually get enough out of the book. See for yourself.

I'd love to hear more about the Shichida courses from families attending one of the academies! Infants solving complex equations?? Sounds a bit too good to be true! What is your experience?

[dakat]

Thanks for the revew!

[robbyjo]

If Shichida's results were so ground-breaking, he should've published a few papers in English journals. I've tried to search, but to no avail. If you could point to, say, a few of his research papers in Japanese, I would appreciate it. I would try to read them. That way I could see through the advertising fluffs.

[happyj]

Thank you for the  review. It is very helpful.

[GeniusExperiment]

robbyjo, this is exactly why I bought the books - to see if there is any evidence or research. As you will see when you read it, this is my main criticism of the book as well - there is no research on his stuff as it is. But as I am a cognitive psychologist, I was familiar with quite a few studies that focus on right brain capabilities and if you know about flash anzan, mind maps or mnemonics then you know that visualisation can be really powerful. It certainly seems to be a big business and you won't find much research for his specific methods, you will also see when you google that it says he holds a PhD but I couldn't find out from which institution, and in any case his PhD is apparently in education, not in cognitive psychology, which would be the field where you would expect actual scientific experiments to be done.

[Chris1]

Robbyjo,

"their extraordinary claims are rarely, if ever, supported by any scientific evidence – which means that there is nothing there to disprove but bald assertions."
http://gerryp.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/evaluation-of-superachievers-magazine/

Shichida claims that babies can subitize upto 100 and perform rapid mental calculations.
The latest research has shown that babies are born with the ability to tell instantly whether there are one, two or three objects before them, but this ability to subitize does not extend beyond four objects. Beyond four objects, babies and adults group the objects into smaller groups and add these groups or recognise these patterns. For example, eight is seen as two groups of four or two groups of three and a group of two.

‘Rain Man’, Kim Peek, was not able to subitize beyond four and there are no examples of savants with this ability. Babies can distinguish between quantities provided the ratio is not close to 1:1. Honing this skill might develop number sense.

Claims on ESP are again not supported by the evidence.

Hemispherectomy and the amazing powers of the right brain.

There are individuals with only a single intact right hemisphere.

This procedure is almost exclusively performed in children because their brains generally display more neuroplasticity allowing neurons from the remaining hemisphere to take over the tasks from the lost hemisphere. A. Smith 1987, demonstrated that one patient with this procedure had completed college, attended graduate school and scored above average on intelligence tests. Studies have found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality, or humour after the procedure, and minimal changes in cognitive function overall. Generally, the greater the intellectual capacity of the patient prior to surgery, the greater the decline in function. Most patients end up with mild to severe mental retardation, which is usually already present before surgery. When re-sectioning the left hemisphere, evidence indicates that some advanced language functions (i.e., higher order grammar) cannot be entirely assumed by the right side. The extent of advanced language loss is often dependent on the patient's age at the time of surgery.

The studies have not revealed any unusual abilities.

Chris1

[TeachingMyToddlers]

I own all of his books and really enjoyed them. His book shows hand written examples of math worksheets, but I will see if I can dig up anything else online. There are videos of children reciting their 1,000 Linking memory images and doing memory demonstrations on YouTube along, with some Flash memory work. Much of it is in Japanese but it's still helpful to see visually that amazing feats of memory are indeed possible. 

Not everyone is going to buy into his methods and theories,  but go into it with an open mind before deciding one way or the other. There is a PHD in Minnesota by the name of Celeste (miller might be her last name?) who wrote a short article on the Schichida methods. Additionally, Duke university has an entire department dedicated to parapsychology which delves into similar concepts as some of his esp games and such. I am traveling at the moment, but when I have access to my laptop I will post some videos and links for you.

[Chris1]

Hi TeachingMyToddlers,

Are you sure that Duke University has an entire department dedicated to parapsychology? There was a laboratory run by J.B. Rhine, but his links with Duke University were broken in 1965.

It seems very odd that parapsychologists continue to investigate despite not having demonstrated evidence of psychic abilities in more than a century of research.

There is nothing right brained or amazing about the linked memory method. With very little effort you could learn how to recall the order of a deck of cards after just one viewing.The right left brain dichotomy is a myth– the use of sophisticated brain scanning techniques has made it clear that brain function uses both hemispheres of the brain in a complimentary way. Brain scans have shown that the idea that in any individual one hemisphere or the other of the brain will be dominant is incorrect. The brain operates in an integrated fashion.
 
We don’t need pseudo-science to promote early learning.
Chris.

[GeniusExperiment]

I highly recommend the books by Dean Radin on ESP, "Entangled Minds" and "the Conscious Universe", he summarises all the scientific evidence regarding ESP. Long story short is that there is some evidence for the existence of ESP, especially among people with a strong connection (e.g. twins). If you are sceptical (like I was), you can just download those two books as free samples on kindle, read the first chapter and see for yourself. His point is that it is nothing paranormal but effects which cannot currently be explained by conventional science, but that more and more effects in physics / chaos theory suggest that particles are connected beyond physical form. As an analogy, think of certain animals who can feel a tsunami is coming - this is nothing paranormal, it is just that a certain part of their brain intuitively picks up vibrations or the smell of the wind or whatever it is that makes them aware they're in danger and have to move. So you need to see ESP as a certain intuition we have inbuilt like other animals that we fail to listen to because we are so focused on the visible and whatever can be captured via words.

Chris, it is true that the right brain / left brain distinction is very simplified and you have most functions located in both hemispheres, however if you take it as a concept and not so much as a physical statement (i.e. you accept we have visual/intuitive and verbal/logical/explicit functions) then you can still use it. I studied cognitive and experimental psychology and I distinctly remember certain experiments they told us which suggested the visual memory is near perfect and it was not the linked memories method. I don't remember the authors because I studied this a decade ago and I'm sure I could dig it out, but in one experiment, they flashed about 1,000 photographs to normal students and if after they asked them "what colour was the car?" and all those sort of verbal questions that required conscious recall, the recall rate was near zero, however if after they instructed the students to say just if they had seen the picture before yes or no and showed some new pictures and some that had been shown, recall rate was something like 90-95%. So that suggests we may not be able to answer any question consciously about something we saw, but we may actually be able to remember thousands of pictures in a very short time frame in the sense that we know we have seen them or not (suggesting there is a trace in our memory after all). Also read up on subliminal images and the behavioural effects they can have.

I'm not trying to defend Shichida and I'm sure there's a large element of pseudoscientific marketing, but I would like to correct the view that all his claims are made up, there is actually lots of scientific evidence for many of the "right brain " effects that he quotes. Also, keep in mind there is no accepted scientific evidence that babies can learn to read or that Glenn Doman was right but if you interact with people on this forum, it will be really hard to maintain that babies can't learn to read. So sometimes I think anecdotal evidence is so strong that you have to question what scientific evidence is out there, especially in such a young field.

[robbyjo]

GeniusExperiment, thank you for the book reference. I would not be swayed by the books alone, however. I would love to see the latest papers on ESP.

I'm very highly skeptical on ESP front since there is no respectable scientific journals would even entertain with such idea. In fact, out and out research has shown that there is no difference between ESP and the null hypothesis.

It seems that Radin's website is here:
http://noetic.org/directory/person/dean-radin/#publications

He appears to have been publishing into journals with low impact factors (~1.0 or less). An impact factor (IF) is a "score" to measure the perceived quality of a given journal. For a rule of thumb, a journal with IF ~4.0 is good for pilot studies, ~8.0 is very respectable for highly experimental studies with long term application, >12 is for very very good studies. A journal with IF ~2.5-3.0 is very good for proof of concepts and very theoretical-oriented studies. IF below 2.5, however, is somewhat questionable. That speaks volumes on his research quality, I would say. Granted, I am oblivious to the field. So, I will try to delve a bit further before making additional comments.

[TeachingMyToddlers]

Per Wikipedia:

The administration of Duke grew less sympathetic to parapsychology, and after Rhine's retirement in 1965 parapsychological links with the university were broken. Rhine later established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM) and the Institute for Parapsychology as a successor to the Duke laboratory.[1] In 1995, the centenary of Rhine's birth, the FRNM was renamed the Rhine Research Center. Today, the Rhine Research Center is a parapsychology research unit, stating that it "aims to improve the human condition by creating a scientific understanding of those abilities and sensitivities that appear to transcend the ordinary limits of space and time."

So apparently the legacy of his work continues under a different name that is no longer affiliated with Duke, however, there are still other university labs studying this subject matter in the U.S. and beyond  (University of Virginia is one I know if off hand) . To me, if universities agreed to back this kind of research at any point in time, that says perhaps I should take a closer look before discounting these kinds of claims.

Regardless of HOW it was learned, (right brain/left brain/or whole brain), Shichida method still offers children excellent memory training. For those interested to see it, here is a child from Shichida Child Academy Yachiyo Narita classroom reciting 1,000 images (in Japanese)

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/yo4oRzYKvyg&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/yo4oRzYKvyg&rel=1</a>

Here is another amazingly talented child who participated in Right Brain training.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/uov17e7r5cQ&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/uov17e7r5cQ&rel=1</a>

There is a part two which can be found on the following playlist along with many other related videos. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV22lJfjA2X0SA0L0OdhUb7wg_WgROiU5

Here is the article written by a PhD in Montana
http://www.midbrain-activation.com/support-files/02celesteshichidamethod.pdf

The way I see it, I choose to believe in the work of Dr. Shichida but I am very open to these sorts of things. But even if you DON'T buy into his reasoning, clearly children such as those posted above have found the classes to be beneficial. So part of me says, who cares why or how it works, but everyone will probably find many of the exercises he recommends to be beneficial for their children. I don't really care to debate it and I am not an "evangelical" person about it to try and convince others to see it my way. I just wanted to share my  opinion that I do think it's pretty neat, legitimate stuff.

[robbyjo]

Memory training techniques, such as mnemonics, "method of loci", have been scientifically validated out and out. Whether this has something to do with right-brain training, on the other hand, is questionable. And this is definitely outside of the realm of ESP. I would not doubt that anyone could use the techniques to perform such fantastic memory feat.

If Shichida has a great method to such memory training, I would definitely agree that such method exists. His method is probably more systematic and/or more effective. Who knows.

I think it is important to distinguish facts from fictions. I would be very interested to see / learn what Shichida can really accomplish. This is why I would want some objective description (preferably scientific papers) to skip over the marketing fluffs.

Edit: Also, if Shichida's method is not much different than an ordinary memory method, I would like to see which one is more effective. The video shows that Shichida's method is effective. The question then becomes: "Is it worth shelling $$$ for Shichida's method when there are alternatives (possibly cheaper or free) that are just about equally effective?"

[cokers4life]

TMT, I love it when you talk about Right Brain.  You always share some interesting articles and papers to read.

I think the reason we do not see a lot about the Shichida method here in the Western hemisphere is really due to a culture difference and approach to science.    Western civilization removes any intuition from science as it lacks a definitive form of measurement.  In Eastern cultures, I find that they are led by their intuition.  While one side will dismiss due to lack of definitive measuring standards, another side will consider and explore.  Both sides have something to offer to science in my opinion.   It's the Ying and Yang of the world of science.   They balance each other.

To give perspective on the merging of the two worlds of thought, I find this article from the Harvard Gazette in 2002 fascinating.   http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/04.18/09-tummo.html     We hardly have a grasp on the human mind, but there is hope that Western Science community will continue to consider the scientific explorations going on in the Eastern Science Community and their culture. 

[Mela Bala]

I remember reading this paper not too long ago by Daryl  Bem who is currently a professor at Cornell.  He graduated with degrees in physics and has a Phd in Social Psychology. 

http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf

I understand and respect that there are individuals who are skeptic about the sixth sense.  Without the research, attempts and success of individuals we have achieved many things once thought to be impossible. 

Edit- Wanted to add this video

http://video.foxnews.com/v/929512104001/the-sixth-sense/

[Chris1]

Hi Mela Bala,

Exhaustive research conducted over the last 100 years has failed to demonstrate evidence of psychic abilities.

Controversial ESP Study Fails
“A team of researchers Professor Chris French (Goldsmiths, University of London), Stuart Ritchie (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for precognition.”
“Bem, who had encouraged other researchers to replicate his study, acknowledged that the latest findings do not support his claims, writing that “I believe that Ritchie, Wiseman, and French have made a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results of one of my experiments on precognition….”
http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/esp-study-120315.htm

Chris.

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