What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence.

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

·         West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.

·         National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.

·         College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit.

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle." Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit has a payoff.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source:

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

As 2014 year comes to an end, I will continue the Brain Posts tradition of highlighting the Top Ten most viewed posts for the year.

It is always informative to find the posts that generate the most site visits. I am surprised at some of the posts that make the list and at some of the posts that do not.

Here are the posts making the list for 2014 beginning with number 10. Clicking on the post title will link you to the full post.

Naptime Stories Boost Word Learning in Children

This post summarized an interesting study of reading and word memory retention in children. It highlights the importance of sleep for memory consolidation and retention. The time immediately proceeding naps is an important time to use for teaching.

The Genetics of Religious Belief

In April, I reviewed some recent brain research related to religion and religious belief. The number 9 most viewed post examined a twin study of religious belief. This study found important genetic contributions to adult religious belief and attendance. Apparently, genetic brain wiring contributes to our later religious affiliation.

The Social Brain: Weeking Reading Links 

In 2014 I started posting links to a list of abstracts I felt were important. These came from my PubMed searches on specific topics. Some abstracts were later give a full post but many did not. The Weekend Reading links on the Social Brain was popular and ended up number 8 on the Top Ten list.

Is Insomnia Relief Just a Mouse Click Away?

The number 7 ranked post for 2014 was a review of an internet-based cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia. This study supported the value of this approach and holds the potential to make CBT treatments more accessible and potential more affordable. Look for more studies of using internet and mobile health approaches for the treatment of common medical conditions.

Acute Brain Response to Exercise in Healthy Adults

There are both acute and chronic effects of exercise on the brain. The number 6 most viewed post this year highlighted a study of acute effects of exercise on healthy adults. The study used advanced brain imaging techniques and demonstrated changes in the pattern of blood flow distribution with exercise. These changes may contribute to the known beneficial effects of exercise on brain plasticity.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I will post the top five viewed posts next week.

Photo of angel Christmas ornament is from the author's files.

Follow the author on Twitter WRY999.

In response to the trend to abolish teaching of cursive in schools, about a year ago I posted an article on what I thought were the developmental benefits of handwriting (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter). That post has generated over 230 comments.

Now there is evidence that handwriting of lecture notes, compared to typing on a laptop, improves learning by college students. Following up on prior studies that indicated relative ineffectiveness of taking notes by laptop, researchers Pam Meuller and Daniel Oppenheimer provide clear evidence that handwritten note-taking produces better learning in college students.

They reported three experiments that compared the efficacy of college students taking notes by handwriting or with a lap top. Those who used handwritten notes that they studied later scored significantly higher than students using laptops, including fleet typists who took vastly more copious notes. Handwriters took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording. There are many possible explanations, beginning with the "less is more" idea in which too much information produces cognitive overload. Notably, when the typing students were told to avoid verbatim notes, they still did it. This suggests that there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing.  Handwritten notes involve more thought, re-framing, and re-organization, all of which promote better understanding and retention. The manual act of handwriting requires more engagement with the subject matter. Finally, handwritten notes capitalize on the use of drawings and of personalized spatial layout of the notes. Memorization involves not only what the information is, but where it is spatially located.

Added note: Readers interested in education are invited to join our Neuro-education group on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4883556&trk=my_groups-tile-grp)

Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. 23 April. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581

I have written before about research that clearly demonstrates improved learning after sleep. Sleep promotes the "consolidation" of recently acquired short-term memories into more permanent memories.  Impaired consolidation is a major problem in teaching and learning. Teachers often have to repeat the same instruction again and again, and yet many children still do not perform well on high-stakes tests. Anything teachers can do to improve retention of instruction would be useful, and that includes making school children aware that they probably need to get more sleep. The well-known change in sleep cycles during adolescence makes a strong case for starting school later in the morning. But another issue is whether or not naps during the school day would improve learning.

A recent study in Brazilian schools has addressed this question by having 371 6th graders take a nap after receiving a 15-minute lecture on intentionally novel information that was not relevant to the normal curriculum. Students were then given a surprise multiple-choice test on this content at three different times after the lecture: 1, 2, and 5 days after the lecture.  Scores were compared with that of a pre-test on this material before the lecture.

Students were divided into a nap group, in which students were given sleep masks and encouraged to try to sleep, lying down on mats in a quiet room. The other group went to a regular class by their usual teacher after the lecture.

Not surprisingly, both groups showed improved scores (12% gain) when tested the next day. However, this gain disappeared by five days in the non-nap group, whereas essentially no decline in test scores was evident at testing two or five days later. Teachers would not be surprised that students soon forgot what they are taught. In this situation, the preserved memory in the nap group was especially impressive, given that the study was designed to impair learning in both nap and non-nap groups in four ways:

1.      Students were not allowed to take notes.

2.      Students were not encouraged to remember this information.

3.      The lecture topic was not relevant to the curriculum.

4.      Students did not know they were going to be tested.

If these constraints on learning had not been present, I suspect that the nap effect would have been much larger. Moreover, there was no objective measure of how much actual sleep each student had. Many might have just been resting. Data were not tracked by individual student, but rather averaged over the whole group. Finally, multiple-choice tests were used, and these only test recognition memory. If naps do improve memory, a larger nap effect might be seen with tests that call for students to generate a remembered answer, as in short answer or fill-in-the blanks tests.

While theory and experiments such as this suggest that napping could help student learning, there are of course practical constraints. Time spent napping is time that content cannot be presented.

My experience as an educational consultant in schools is that schools seem to conspire to make learning difficult. First, students are constantly over-stimulated and distracted, not only by social interactions, but by posters, pictures, and do-dads placed conspicuously all over the rooms and in the halls. Many teachers allow students to multi-task, for example, using cell and smart phones in class. Classes are commonly disturbed by loud public-speaker announcements from the principal's office and by loud bells signaling the end of class. Immediately after class, no quiet time is allowed for reflection on what happened in class. Students actually start tuning out about five minutes before the anticipated bell ring, and the bell causes them to leap up, run out into the halls, and start socializing. Then, of course, there is the emphasis on all manner of extracurricular activities that occupy the minds of many students much more than curriculum. It's a wonder students learn anything.

Finally, few if any teachers teach students how to learn. The emphasis is on what to learn and on performing well on state-mandated test scores. I have started to give teacher workshops to help teachers realize the importance of developing learning competence in their students. If students had better learning skills, the job of teaching would be much easier and student test performance would improve automatically.

Source:

Lemos, N. et al. (2014). Naps in school can enhance the duration of declarative memories learned by adolescents. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. Vol. 8, article 103. Doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00103

Dr. Klemm is author of two books on learning and memory, Memory Power 101 and Better Grades, Less Effort.

To follow up my prior post on jazz, I just read a scientific report published last week that suggests that training of musical creativity in jazz causes long-lasting changes in brain function. In this study, musicians completed a questionnaire that allowed researchers to know the extent of each subject's prior classical and jazz training. Functional MRI brain scans were taken with subjects lying down on their back with a piano keyboard on their lap, playing improvisations with their right hand. Ear phones allowed players to hear their improvisations.

Brain scan showed distinct activity differences in the jazz musicians and that difference was greater in those with longer jazz histories. Past improvisation experience increased the functional bilateral connectivity of the dorsal premotor cortex, the pre-supplemental motor areas of cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Decreased activity connectivity was noted in executive control frontal-parietal areas. Thus, it would seem that creativity training, in jazz at least, changes the brain at a network level. Presumably, these connectivity changes were created by past histories in learning jazz and no doubt facilitated improvisation by automating some of the neural functions needed to perform it.

How do we interpret the decreased activity in executive-control areas of cortex? Multiple other brain-scan studies in other contexts have indicated that as a brain becomes proficient in a certain task, apparently less neural tissue is needed to perform the task. Decreased activity can therefore indicate task mastery.
Scientists have known for a decade or more that learning and memory in general change both brain anatomy and function. Such changes are typically linked to the neural requirements for performing specific kinds of tasks. This study of classical and jazz musicians follows on prior studies showing that musical training does change the brain. For example, violin players have enhanced neural activity in the motor cortex controlling hand movements. The relative size of the left and right motor cortex differs between piano and string players.

The importance of this present study is that it demonstrates that the brain change depends on the kind of musical training and appears to be selective for improvisation. Moreover, musical improvisational training affects more than just control over movements and extends to cognitive functions needed to improvise. Improvisation is a creative act that apparently recruits cortical circuits to support it and in the process rewires the brain to facilitate improvisation.

Improvisation relies heavily on memory of previously learned musical patterns and implementation strategies. Jazz players call this "musical vocabulary." Thus, jazz players have to become musicians first, then learn how to improvise. Because memory is a "process in a population, not a thing in a place," neural representation of musical vocabulary is probably widely distributed, and the brain must learn how to recruit connections from multiple brain areas and integrate them in real time in the prefrontal and movement-control parts of the brain, which apparently generate creative ideas and implement them.


Source:

Pinho, A. L. et al. (2014) Connecting to create: expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased functional connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas. J. Neuroscience. 34 (18): 6156-6163. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769.13-2014.

                         Memory Medic has a new book being distributed by Random House: 

                         Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate.

I just got back from my second trip to the Katy Jazz festival, run by a school district just West of Houston. It was time for a jazz fix. You see, I am a jazz fan, and though not compulsive, I do need to dash occasionally to New Orleans or go to a festival like the one in Katy.

How does one become a jazz fan, particularly somebody like me who doesn't know much about music and who can't stand 200-year-old church music or the new mind-numbing songs in so many "contemporary" services. For Texas students who live in enlightened districts like Katy ISD, jazz appreciation starts as early as middle school in the larger schools that spin off jazz training from their marching and concert bands.

My fanhood began in the summer when I turned 19. After finishing my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a fraternity brother talked me into spending the summer in Hollywood, where his family had moved. He steered me around all the clubs and concert venues, and I saw in person jazz icons like Stan Kenton, Cab Calloway, Gerry Mulligan, Louie Belson, Chet Baker, Shelley Mann, and Shorty Rogers. My buddy and I would even spend a whole evening listening to Dave Brubeck and Joe Morello for the price of one beer, which we managed to take three hours to milk.

At first, I thought what I was hearing was just unstructured noise. My buddy explained what was going on, usually opening with the tune's melody line, then improvising on that melody line, and then gracefully finding the way back home to the tune's opening statement. And I didn't need to know musical details to appreciate the rhythms that flowed through my body like honey on a warm biscuit.

I am since learning a lot at the Katy festival where some 12 schools showed off their jazz bands and subsumed combos. The festival also featured sets from eight professional combos. But the really important part is that the student groups are given critiques by professional musicians, many of whom are or have been college music professors. The critiques are miked so the audience can hear. From such instruction I am learning that really big things are happening in the brain's mental biology as one listens to or plays jazz.

First the listening: the most obvious effect is stress reduction. Stress, as I have explained in early posts, is the arch-enemy of memory ability. In my case, I put my West Coast jazz experience to good use in mastering the veterinary curriculum at Auburn. While classmates were beating their brains up trying to learn all the stuff involved in veterinary medicine (more than in human medicine), I spent a lot of my time listening to jazz records. And I still beat all but four classmates in grades.

Listening is also fun, probably less so than playing jazz, but still a lot of fun. In San Antonio, Jim Cullum's band used to be called the "Happy Jazz Band." Think about where jazz came from. It is uniquely an American innovation, beginning as emotional relief for slaves who found comfort in the blues, which eventually spawned jazz in its happier forms. Wholesome fun promotes happiness. Happy brains learn better. They can also often live longer (remember my blog on the long life span of so many stand-up comedians). Think about Preservation Hall in New Orleans. There and elsewhere around the country, many jazz artists are still performing sophisticated music in their 80s.

 As for mental biology, a jazz player experiences enormous mental stimulation, Even as a listener, after a concert my untrained brain churns out a continuous stream of improvisation in my mind's ear that can include multiple instruments that I have no idea how to play. A player has to engage the brain in multiple ways that classical musicians do not. First, there are added technical requirements, such as playing blue notes, swinging eighth notes, and unusual time signatures like 12/8 and 5/4 or complex African or Latin rhythms.  Then there is the huge challenge of improvisation, which is basically composing on the fly. When improvising, there is a safety net of knowing the proper chord structure and melody, but players have to have a huge musical vocabulary and realize in milliseconds what new notes will fit. They also have to listen hard so they can interact properly with what others in the band are playing. The "call and response" paradigm in jazz is actually musical conversation. I can't think of anything more mentally demanding, especially for youngsters in early stages of learning music. Early middle school is a particularly time-sensitive period for mental development, and I suspect that middle school jazz bands can have disproportionate beneficial effects on brain development.

Learning jazz may be the ultimate in training young minds to think critically and creatively. An earlier blog post after my fist trip to the Katy festival focused on the exceptional teaching skills of jazz band directors. Many teachers protested, saying in essence that anybody can teach good students. Regular teachers get stuck with so many underachievers. Maybe we should consider the possibility that jazz-band students are such high achievers because their jazz training has trained their brains in invaluable learning capacities for hand-eye coordination, the ability to memorize, discipline, patience, critical and creative thinking, high-speed intellectual engagement with the ideas of others, and self-actualization and confidence.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that mental challenge develops new connections in the brain and with it, new biological capabilities. In jazz, such mental enrichment enhances the ability to memorize, not only directly in terms of having to learn a large musical vocabulary and the rules of jazz, but also in terms of basic mental biology. My new book, Mental Biology, explains some of the basic ideas.

Remember when you were a child and adults seemed to always be saying, "You are too young. Wait till you get older." Or, they said, "You will understand this better when you grow up." Now that you are older, especially if you are my age, people seem to be saying in the politest way they can, "When are you planning to retire?" "We have to make room for younger workers."

Oh, and if you are in the job market, a young person is often told "I'm afraid you don't have enough experience yet." But if you are over 50 or so, they will say "You are over-qualified for this position."

These inevitable put-downs are bad enough. But what you may not realize is that when you accept such judgments of others, you may well impair your performance capability and development. Here, I report research showing that this effect applies particularly to seniors, and that the effect can be counteracted by the right kind of intervention.

A study by Becca Levy (1) showed that seniors can generate a positive self-stereotype that improves memory performance. Moreover, the effect is more readily established if positive priming is done implicitly, that is without conscious realization. In this study they flashed positive-stereotype words on a screen at a rate fast enough to be registered by the brain but below the level of consciousness. Prior studies had shown that it is rather difficult to improve memory performance with explicit priming, perhaps because such priming is superficial relative to what might occur with implicit conditioning. This point is relevant here because much of our age-stereotype processing, both in youth and older age, is subliminal. While consciously we reject the age-related limitations that others imposed on us, repeatedly experiencing the put-downs grinds away at our resistance by unconscious, implicit means.

Here, a computer subliminally presented 90 seniors with words related either to an old-age image of senility or wisdom. Because all people vary a little in their speed threshold for conscious perception of words on a screen (it takes about 125-250 msecs), the view time was adjusted to be just below threshold for each subject. Before and after the priming intervention, three kinds of memory tests were given: 1) working memory immediately after a test, 2) recall immediately after repeat testing confirmed learning, and 3) recall after a delay in which other tasks were performed.

The group that received subliminal stimulation of positive stereotype words had better memory test scores, a higher estimate of their memory capability, and a more positive outlook on tests that measured attitude about aging. Declines were observed in the group that received negative-stereotype word stimulation.

A second study tested young people in the same way, and no such benefit of positive-stereotype conditioning was evident. This may indicate that a person’s pre-existing self-image governs how one responds to priming. Young people have not been pre-conditioned to think their memory is weak because of age.

A related study showed that a person’s explicit belief in their self-efficacy affects their memory performance (2). Typically, as a person ages, the confidence in memory ability declines. But this study aimed to raise confidence in memory ability in 84 people over 50 by a memory training program that integrated a memory skills training class for six weeks, three hours per week, with elements designed to change beliefs about memory competence. The study showed that by emphasizing mastery, verbal encouragement, reduced anxiety, and modeling skills throughout training, subjects became more convinced that they should believe in themselves and their ability to learn how to be more effective learners. And the memory tests bore out that prediction.

Recent studies by my fellow faculty member at Texas A&M, Lisa Geraci and her collaborator, showed that memory confidence can be easily bolstered in seniors and that, once more confident, they perform better (3). Their review of older literature established that negative stereotype priming can make seniors underperform. In their study, young college students and older adults (70 years average) were divided into equal groups that took a mental task that could be readily completed, or was impossible to complete, or given no task. The task items were clusters of five scrambled words that were to be re-arranged into a comprehensible sentence. Neutral words were used that had no priming relevance to age stereotyping. All subjects then took a free recall of a word list they were allowed to study for two minutes. OIder subjects in the task-success group recalled more words and reported less test-anxiety than those in the task-failure group or in the no-task group. No such task effects were seen in the young adults.

So, how can we apply these findings to everyday life outside the laboratory? Obviously, we have to contrive other ways to provide implicit positive priming. Maybe this could come from making more of an effort to improve memory, as my book Memory Power 101 aims to do. When your memory ability improves from using some established learning principles and techniques, you implicitly know it and that would reinforce positive feelings about memory capability. Indeed, this is what "memory athletes" experience. As they practice memorizing, they get better at it, of course, and this must surely have a subliminal effect on their sense of innate capability which in turn helps them reach memory championship-level performance.

Each of these studies makes the point that if you believe you can remember better, maybe you really can, and that in turn promotes positive feelings about the ability to remember. This becomes a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop for success.  Learning capability improves, in large part because of "learning-set" principles, which is a topic for another day. But as these studies I just summarized show, there is a beneficial component from a change in attitude about one's stereotype. So, for both reasons, I emphasize with my students,

The more you know, the more you can know.

Sources:

1. Levy, Becca. (1996). Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. J. Personality and Social Psychology. 71 (6), 1092-1107).

2. West, R. L. et al. (2008). Self-efficacy and memory aging: the impact of a memory intervention based on self-efficacy. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. Doi: 10.1080/13825580701440510.

3. Geraci, L., and Miller, T. M. (2013) Improving older adults’ memory performance using prior task success. Psychology and Aging. 28 (2), 340-345.

If we learn anything about educational policy, we should learn that what we have tried over the last couple of decades to improve student achievement doesn’t work very well. I won’t bore you with all the statistics showing that academic ability of U.S. students lags that of most other developed countries and our ranking is not improving. I would like to explore one reason for lack of progress besides faulty federal policy. And that reason is research funding. We don’t know enough about how brains learn and remember, nor how to apply what we do know to educational policy.

The recently announced winners of the Nobel Prize included nine from the U.S. In a recent joint interview by leaders of the American Association of Science, the winners spent little time discussing their research achievements, preferring to expound on some serious concerns about how research is now funded in the U.S.

Of course, some of these concerns could be considered whining. Like much of the general public, the scientific community has become dependent on government. When federal funds don’t grow at high rates, scientists can be cry-babies too. Nobody seems to care much about the growing federal debt and a very real threat of looming financial disaster in this country. Interest groups, including those in science, think if we have to cut funding, it should come out of somebody else’s piece of the pie. As a result, nothing much gets cut anywhere.

But there are legitimate issues about science policy and how federal money is allocated for research. The U.S. leads the world in Nobel Prizes by about 3 to 1. Actually, this understates our prowess. Young scientists from all over the world come here to learn world-class science, but we make most of them go back home to become science superstars in their own country. At the same time, we have little stomach for deporting uneducated illegal aliens. It’s hard to think of a more stupid immigration policy.

Randy Schekman, physiology winner, said that many of our best young foreign scientists are "returning to their countries because those countries, unlike ours, see the promise of investment in basic science. It's actual damage that's occurring right now." Several of the other laureates concurred.

The future of U.S. science may well be in jeopardy. The new Nobelists point out that the buying power of National Institute of Health funding has shrunk by 28% over the last seven or eight years. Moreover, government needs to re-think how that money is distributed. For example:

·         Michael Levitt, who won the award for chemistry, said "A huge change in the last 30 years has been that people under 40 get almost no money, and people over 65 get lots of money. Everyone here would agree that we made our discoveries when we were under 40."

·         James Rothman, winner in physiology, blamed big-science mentality where too much money as being “allocated into pre-determined projects is heading toward bureaucrat-driven science."

I fought the grant wars for years and finally gave up. I got too few grants for all the time I wasted writing proposals. Several of the Nobelists commented on how much time scientists waste writing proposals that don’t get funded.

Another part of the problem, apparently not mentioned in the interview, is that too much money is soaked up by too few grants. Universities have negotiated enormous overhead fees, sometimes exceeding 100% of the grant, and that is money that mostly goes into the institutions’ general fund, not the funded project. Also, too much grant money goes to salary support for the scientists. It used to be that universities were committed to supporting their scientists. Now, universities expect their scientists to hustle money for the university. As a result, too much grant money gets consumed by projects that are scientifically sexy and will sell, not necessarily for the most promising science. An associated problem is that government spends way too much grant money pursuing scientific fads. Far too many areas in science have no chance of getting competitive funding simply because they are currently unfashionable.

Source:

http://membercentral.aaas.org/announcements/us-nobel-prize-winners-honored-dc