TO SLEEP, TO DREAM
Where does dreaming fit into the information provided in “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work,” by Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen? Does dreaming interfere, improve or have no effect on sleep’s enhancement of memory?
“old curmudgeon”
adapted from a comment at www.SciAmMind.com

ELLENBOGEN REPLIES: One proposed mechanism for how sleep leads to memory enhancement is that while we are asleep, the brain is busy replaying previously learned information—kind of like an actor rehearsing his lines. Is that a type of dream? Seen from this perspective, dreams do not influence the memory-enhancing effects of sleep, they are the memory-enhancing effect. But some researchers disagree. This debate will continue until we are able to experimentally manipulate the content of dreams and reliably (that is, objectively) record them during sleep. Stay tuned! For a great summary discussion of this topic, see the fourth edition of Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, edited by Meir H. Kryger, Thomas Roth and William C. Dement (Elsevier, 2008).

SKIPPING GRADES
Christian Fischer’s statement in “Coaching the Gifted Child,” favoring placement of highly gifted children with age peers, ignores a large body of research supporting acceleration. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, in more than 30 years of research, has found that “acceleration has been shown to be an appropriate practice for meeting the needs of academically talented students; as a way to keep these students motivated and appropriately challenged. There is no evidence to support the notion of negative social and emotional consequences of acceleration for talented students as a whole.”

Fischer also perpetuates the negative stereotype of highly gifted children as social misfits and indirectly condones the bullying of gifted children by using the example of a boy who is bullied because he bragged about being smart. In fact, highly gifted children are frequent targets of bullying simply because they are so smart. Recent research at Purdue University found that “by eighth grade, more than two thirds of gifted students have been victims” of bullying.

Social difficulties are not individual “shortcomings,” as Fischer implies; they are a result of developmental asynchrony common to highly gifted children. These children need help to find friends who understand them and share common interests and who are not threatened by their intellect; these friends are not easy to find among age peers. The highly gifted child will typically have no intellectual peers and endure both boredom and bullying when kept at grade level. Highly gifted children who find older intellectual peers (or other highly gifted age peers) can experience increased self-esteem, not feeling “inferior in every other realm,” as the article states.
“Miss Prism”
adapted from a comment at www.SciAmMind.com

REAL STORIES
In “The Secrets of Storytelling,” Jeremy Hsu speaks of “the human predilection for storytelling.” Although he mentions nonfiction, the weight of his article is on fiction. Hsu links the idea of story with “the safe, imaginary world,” “fantasy,” “folktales” and “narrative traditions”—these are descriptions of fiction. But the father who, putting his children to bed at the end of day, says to them, “Let me tell you the story of how I met your mother,” is engaging in storytelling and captivating his listeners just as much—and maybe even more so—as is the father who says to his kids, “Once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a land of dragons.” If we are going to study the fascinating world of stories, we must include in our discussion all acts of storytelling: fiction but also gossip, rumor, anecdotes, teaching stories, slice-of-life stories, personal histories, and so on. We must, uppermost, keep in mind that “story” refers to a certain mode of expression, not to a type of narrative.
David H. Morgan
Richmond, Va.