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1-Page Summary of Thirty Million Words

Overview

My parents read stories to me when I was a child. These were about mystical creatures, talking trees, beautiful faeries and fearless heroes on great adventures.

What Are Fairytales Good For?

Reading and telling stories to our children helps them develop a love for imagination and eventually speech. But you may not know that it’s also important for the child to be exposed to positive language, so they can learn how to talk well.

The brain is wired differently in children. They learn by listening to people talk, and they can be influenced positively by their parents.

The book also explains why children are like freestanding telephone poles, how the brain becomes less receptive as we age, and why it’s so important to talk to your kids every day.

Big Idea #1: The formation of neural connections during the first three years of life lays a foundation for future cognitive abilities.

From the moment you are born, everything you experience and see shapes your brain. This happens more rapidly during the first three years of life as a person’s brain is initially unconnected, like telephone poles without wires. During this time, between 700 and 1,000 new neuronal connections are made every second. As these neurons connect to each other in an effort to make sense of the world around them (a process known as synaptic pruning), a complex network is created and then pared down over time through selective removal of unnecessary pathways (known as synaptic pruning). The ability to alter these neural pathways increases during this period because it gives people more control over their brains than they will have at any other point in their lives.

The ability to interpret language requires profound intelligence. The brain development that occurs during the first three years lays the foundation for future intellectual capacity.

In fact, a baby’s brain is able to recognize the specific sound patterns of her parents’ languages. This will lay the foundation for speaking their native tongue and reduce its ability to separate sounds in other languages later in life. Therefore, it becomes harder for people to learn new languages as they grow older.

Big Idea #2: Early language proficiency is central to educational achievement, including abstract and mathematical thinking.

Language is much more than just speech and words. If we don’t learn it early, it will affect our education later on.

Kids who don’t have a good grasp of language when they start kindergarten will fall behind their peers in learning. They will miss out on information and be even further behind. This is similar to trying to converse in a second language that you’ve just begun to learn. In such cases, while listening to your conversation partner, you’re actively processing the words instead of understanding them naturally; by the time you understand them, the topic has changed. Language is key for learning, including mathematical ability and spatial thinking (thinking about numbers). People can intuitively estimate value without much thought – for instance we can choose which line at the supermarket checkout is shorter without much thought. But we need our intuition with symbols and words in order to advance into higher orders of mathematics – so math depends on language.

When counting items, the number of items in a group is dependent on the last item counted. This means that one must be able to see how each word relates to its numeric value and how numbers relate to words. Without this ability, it is impossible for someone to think abstractly about math problems.