Delhi IIT-JEE topper is just 14 & homeschooled

Delhi IIT-JEE topper is just 14 & homeschooled
Neha Pushkarna, TNN, May 27, 2010, 12.47am IST
NEW DELHI: The boy sat hunched, his eyes on the floor and his hands held
in a twisted clasp below his knees, clearly uncomfortable with all the
attention.

On Wednesday, 14-year-old Sahal Kaushik left everyone gasping in
disbelief by not only becoming the youngest ever to crack the tough
IIT-JEE test but also topping it in Delhi and notching an all-India rank
of 33.

Sahal, schooled at home by his mother, Ruchi Kaushik, a
doctor-turned-homemaker, replied after what seemed an eternity to the
barrage of questions ^ which IIT would he join? Would he study
electronics engineering? He looked up: "I want to study pure science,
physics or mathematics, not engineering." He looked down again. "I took
the JEE because I could also get science courses through it."

He looks like any other 14-year-old, but is clearly very special. Sahal
could spell out long words when he was just two, he recited tables till
100 at the age of four, and by the time he was six, he had finished
reading H G Well's 'Time Machine'. The child's brain is obviously wired
differently.

He muttered something to the effect that topping JEE in Delhi wasn't a
"big deal". Then a long pause. Was he doing some complex mental maths,
someone asked. "No," he smiled, "not today." He said he attributed his
success to his mother and his "physics sir" but his all-time idol was
Albert Einstein. He also wanted to do research in astrophysics. His
mother added Sahal may go for a five-year integrated MSc in physics at
IIT-Kanpur.

There is no age bar for entering IIT, but a candidate is required to
clear class XII. So, Sahal enrolled with Vandana International School,
Dwarka, for two years. He scored 78% in PCM ^ marks that might not be
enough to get him into a half-decent Delhi University college. Asked
about his lacklustre class XII results, Sahal said, "That's because I
studied for only four days for each paper."

"This boy doesn't need a pen and paper. He solved JEE orally before
selecting the answers. He speaks less, thinks more," said U P Singh,
Sahal's mentor at Narayan IIT Academy. In the last two years, Sahal was
given a separate group of teachers who taught him exclusively for six
hours, six days a week.

"When he came to us at the age of 12 or 13, he said he was interested in
electrostatics and also answered complex mathematical problems by just
calculating them in the mind. I had never seen anyone like him before,"
Singh said. "But he is what he is thanks to his mother who sacrificed
her career to mentor him so well," he added.

Sahal joined school only in 2006 and cleared class X in 2008. Before he
was introduced to classroom teaching, his mother taught him "like it
should be". He never took any exam, even through NIOS. "I realised very
early that my child was different. I didn't send him to a school as I
thought it would make him dull. I faced a lot of social pressure when I
quit my practice and started teaching him at home 12 years ago. But it
has paid off," said Ruchi Kaushik.

She remembered that she never taught Sahal according to any set pattern.
"Sometimes, we would study geography for days together. On some days, he
only read novels. When he read Charles Dickens, I told him about society
in London back then, and its history too. That's how he learnt," she
explained.
Sahal's father, who is in the Army, is posted in Assam. His sister, who
is two years younger to him, also studies at home. "My daughter was
initially slightly dyslexic but she has overcome it now. She is more
into arts and more outgoing than Sahal," Ruchi said.

Sahal has many "older" friends from the coaching centre. His mother has
invested Rs 15 lakh to put together a library at home. "All our salary
goes into this. We now have more than 2,000 books and Sahal has already
read them all," Ruchi said.

Does Sahal have any hobbies? Any special interests? "He knows all about
Indian mythology," said Ruchi. "He loves reading about Egyptian history
and anthropology." Her daughter, Saras, reminds her, "He also knows
horse-riding and swimming."

Little Saras said her brother has won the Olympiads in maths, physics,
chemistry, biology and has also worked with Dr Ratnashree, head of Nehru
Planetarium, on calibrations in Jantar Mantar. So did Ruchi ever try
finding the reason for her son's gifts? "Not really. That's the way he
is."

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The internet could re-wire your brain -- from WSJ

* The cognitive effects are measurable: We're turning into shallow thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098.html
The title is "Does the Internet Make You Dumber?" but that is just
the catchy title.

By NICHOLAS CARR

The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: "To
be everywhere is to be nowhere." Today, the Internet grants us easy
access to unprecedented amounts of information. But a growing body of
scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant
distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and
superficial thinkers.

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to
anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human
thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show,
comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who
watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in
information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are
continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand
less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many
tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing
at a time.

The common thread in these disabilities is the division of attention.
The richness of our thoughts, our memories and even our personalities
hinges on our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. Only
when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to
associate it "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already
well established in memory," writes the Nobel Prize-winning
neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Such associations are essential to mastering
complex concepts.

When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be
online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural
connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We
become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits
of information into and then out of short-term memory.

In an article published in Science last year, Patricia Greenfield, a
leading developmental psychologist, reviewed dozens of studies on how
different media technologies influence our cognitive abilities. Some of
the studies indicated that certain computer tasks, like playing video
games, can enhance "visual literacy skills," increasing the speed at
which people can shift their focus among icons and other images on
screens. Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus,
even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and "more automatic"
thinking.

56 Seconds
Average time an American spends looking at a Web page.
Source: Nielsen

In one experiment conducted at Cornell University, for example, half a
class of students was allowed to use Internet-connected laptops during a
lecture, while the other had to keep their computers shut. Those who
browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well
they retained the lecture's content. While it's hardly surprising that
Web surfing would distract students, it should be a note of caution to
schools that are wiring their classrooms in hopes of improving learning.

Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive
skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media,
she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can
improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of
simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been
accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes,"
including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive
problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in
a word, shallower.

In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University's
Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of
researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of
media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The
heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more
easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much
less able to distinguish important information from trivia.

The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that
the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental
advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn't the case.
In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They
were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more
infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford
Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.

It would be one thing if the ill effects went away as soon as we turned
off our computers and cellphones. But they don't. The cellular structure
of the human brain, scientists have discovered, adapts readily to the
tools we use, including those for finding, storing and sharing
information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology
strengthens certain neural pathways and weakens others. The cellular
alterations continue to shape the way we think even when we're not using
the technology.

The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are
being "massively remodeled" by our ever-intensifying use of the Web and
related media. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Merzenich, now a professor
emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, conducted a
famous series of experiments on primate brains that revealed how
extensively and quickly neural circuits change in response to
experience. When, for example, Mr. Merzenich rearranged the nerves in a
monkey's hand, the nerve cells in the animal's sensory cortex quickly
reorganized themselves to create a new "mental map" of the hand. In a
conversation late last year, he said that he was profoundly worried
about the cognitive consequences of the constant distractions and
interruptions the Internet bombards us with. The long-term effect on the
quality of our intellectual lives, he said, could be "deadly."

What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our
capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that
underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never
encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental
locomotion.

It is revealing, and distressing, to compare the cognitive effects of
the Internet with those of an earlier information technology, the
printed book. Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book
focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness.

Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental
discipline. The innate bias of the human brain, after all, is to be
distracted. Our predisposition is to be aware of as much of what's going
on around us as possible. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were
once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator
would take us by surprise or that we'd overlook a nearby source of food.

To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. It
requires us to place ourselves at what T. S. Eliot, in his poem "Four
Quartets," called "the still point of the turning world." We have to
forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive
distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and
our mind.

It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of
losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online. If the
slow progression of words across printed pages damped our craving to be
inundated by mental stimulation, the Internet indulges it. It returns us
to our native state of distractedness, while presenting us with far more
distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with.
—Nicholas Carr is the author, most recently, of "The Shallows: What the
Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

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