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Adele Diamond is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia (UBC), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and was recently listed as one of the 15 most influential neuroscientists. One of the pioneers in the field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Adele Diamond is at the forefront of research on the executive functions which depend on prefrontal cortex and interrelated brain regions. Executive functions include 'thinking outside the box' (cognitive flexibility), mentally relating ideas and facts (working memory), and giving considered responses rather than impulsive ones, resisting temptations and staying focused (inhibitory control, including selective attention). These abilities are critical for creative and flexible problem-solving, meeting unanticipated challenges, self-control, reasoning, and the discipline to persevere) and success in all life’s aspects. Dr. Diamond studies how executive functions are affected by biological factors (e.g., genes and neurochemistry) and by environmental ones (e.g., impaired by stress or improved by interventions) especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for medical disorders (PKU] and ADHD and impacted early education. Recently, Adele Diamond has turned her attention to the possible roles of traditional activities, such as music and dance, in improving executive functions, academic outcomes, and mental health. In dozens of recent talks (including a TEDx talk) and on the NPR show, On Being with Krista Tippett, Dr. Diamond points out there is a reason dance, play, storytelling, art, and music have been part of human life for tens of thousands of years and are found ubiquitously in every culture; that perhaps we have discarded the wisdoms of past generations too lightly. ==Early life and education == Adele’s father, Jerome Diamond, was born in 1903 in the Catskills of New York. His was the first Jewish family in Monticello, NY. In the early years they were met with signs everywhere that said, “No jews and dogs allowed.” He attended a one-room schoolhouse and left school to help in the family grocery business. He died as Adele was entering her senior year in high school. Adele’s mother, Mildred Golden, weighed 2 lbs. when she was born in 1916 in New York City. She was placed in a small egg box, put in the oven (to keep her warm), and fed with an eye dropper. She attended Tilden High School in Brooklyn and would have attended college if not for the Great Depression, but instead became the bookkeeper for the family business, “Golden Pickle Works.” She died in 1997. Adele Diamond grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and attended public schools.〔 She graduated from John Bowne High School as Valedictorian. She attended Swarthmore College on a 4-year Swarthmore National Scholarship and majored in Sociology-Anthropology and Psychology (graduating in 1975).〔 She was a member of the Varsity Volleyball and Archery teams all 4 years. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with the highest honor in the course program of study.〔 While still at Swarthmore, in 1972, she attended the London School of Economics, studying the philosophy of science with Imre Lakatos, an important Popperian philosopher.〔 Adele Diamond did her PhD graduate work at Harvard University (graduating in 1983), with a 4-year NSF Graduate Fellowship for those thought to have outstanding research promise and a 3-year Danforth Graduate Fellowship for those committed to university teaching.〔 Although officially a PhD candidate in Psychology, she spent her first 4 years of graduate school working primarily in Anthropology (under John and Bea Whiting and Bob LeVine) and Sociology (under Christopher Jencks).〔 At that time, Harvard had an NIMH-funded Pre-doctoral Training Program in Cross-Cultural Psychological Research and the program awarded Adele 3 years of funding for her dissertation: one year to prepare to go into the field, one year to go anywhere in the world to do the research (she chose the South Pacific because it seemed the most idyllic), and one year to write up the results.〔 People were very enthusiastic about her thesis topic: ‘Is the need to be master of your fate intrinsically human or a product of Western culture?’〔 However, she didn't think she was coming up with a good way to study it and that the famous people advising her were not either.〔 They seemed not to be concerned.,〔 saying, “Don't worry. You do great work." Not wanting to go and do poor science, Adele returned the money for Years 2 and 3.〔 Having given up her initial thesis topic, she returned to a question that Jerome Kagan had posed very excitedly in Adele's first year in graduate school: “If infants all over the world show the same cognitive changes at roughly the same time, those changes cannot be due entirely to learning or experience, because their experiences are too diverse; there must be a maturational component; what might that maturational component be?” 〔 To answer that question, Adele had to turn to neuroscience.〔 She turned to neuroscience not because of an intrinsic interest in it per se; rather her motivation was to answer a particular question that required a neuroscientific approach.〔 The maturational component would clearly be in the brain and Adele hypothesized that maturational changes in the brain’s prefrontal cortex made possible the impressive cognitive advances seen between 6–12 months of age.〔 At that time no one was studying prefrontal cortex or any topic in cognitive neuroscience in the Harvard Psychology Department.〔 Adele learned from books on her own and was granted permission to add Nelson Butters from the Boston VA (who had published widely on the anatomy and functions of prefrontal cortex) to her thesis committee.〔 To get hard evidence on the brain to support her hypothesis, Adele went to Yale University School of Medicine to work with Patricia Goldman-Rakic.〔 That work was supported by Sloan and NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Adele Diamond」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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