Neuroplasticity helps children with learning disabilities

Brain School, a new book from Eaton Arrowsmith School's (EAS) founder and director, Howard Eaton, tells the amazing story of how children with learning disabilities such as Dyslexia, Nonverbal Learning Disabilities and ADHD overcame educational obstacles by reorganizing their brains.

Known as neuroplasticity, this reorganization involves a regimen of cognitive exercises. These, in turn alter the brain's neuronal structure and reorganize neural networks and their function.

Brain School explores how applying principles of neuroplasticity has helped thousands of children with learning disabilities and attention disorders improve their cognitive functioning capacities. As a result, many are able to function without additional support in school and in cases with ADHD, without medication.

The nine students featured in Brain School graduated from EAS in the past six years and then moved on to either private or public schools. Studies have shown that 90 percent of students who graduate from the Arrowsmith Program at EAS are succeeding academically and socially and in many cases these students no longer need special education support services after completing the program.

Eaton Arrowsmith Schools were founded by Howard Eaton, Ed.M., based on the Arrowsmith School principles created by Barbara Arrowsmith Young, who opened the first Arrowsmith School in Toronto, Ontario more than 30 years ago. The schools are built on Arrowsmith Young's cognitive exercises that target 19 specific cognitive areas through stimulation.


The Arrowsmith School was recently named "The Most Innovative Special Education School" by Sharpbrain's 2010 Innovation Awards. The daily curriculum at EAS encompasses 6 cognitive exercise courses, Mathematics and English courses at a child's grade level.

Eaton said he wrote the book to heighten awareness among the general public that there is a better future for children with learning disabilities and attention disorders.


"My hope is that Brain School will ask politicians, educational administrators, psychologists, psychiatrists, family doctors, educators, parents, and others involved in education to be open to the idea that cognitive functioning can improve and the brain can change," he said.

"Because there is a lack of knowledge and facts about neuroplasticity, there is a general trend in education to keep practicing the same instructional remediation methods for children with learning disabilities."

Don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too. - Oliver Sachs

I bring you an extract from a very interesting article from the neuro-physician and author, Oliver Sachs.

NEW Year’s resolutions often have to do with eating more healthfully, going to the gym more, giving up sweets, losing weight — all admirable goals aimed at improving one’s physical health. Most people, though, do not realise that they can strengthen their brains in a similar way.

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language
and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older.

In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.

For example, Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face.
Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger.
Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits —
strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

Music is an especially powerful shaping force, for listening to and especially playing it engages many different areas of the brain, all of which must work in tandem: from reading musical notation and coordinating fine muscle movements in the hands, to evaluating and expressing rhythm and pitch, to associating music with memories and emotion.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

To read the full article go here Don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too. - NYTimes.com

Neuroplastic Changes to the Brain using Neurofeedback

A pioneering collaboration between two laboratories from the University of London has provided the first evidence of neuroplastic changes occurring directly after natural brainwave training.

Researchers from Goldsmiths and the Institute of Neurology have demonstrated that half an hour of voluntary control of brain rhythms is sufficient to induce a lasting shift in cortical excitability and intracortical function.

Remarkably, these after-effects are comparable in magnitude to those observed following interventions with artificial forms of brain stimulation involving magnetic or electrical pulses.

The novel finding may have important implications for future non-pharmacological therapies of the brain and calls for a serious re-examination and stronger backing of research on neurofeedback, a technique which may be promising tool to modulate cerebral plasticity in a safe, painless, and natural way.

Inner control of one's own brain activity may be learned with the aid of a brain-computer interface, which acts to display a person's instantaneous brain activation on a computer screen through what is known as a "neurofeedback" loop.

During brainwave neurofeedback, a visual display on a computer screen behaves like a virtual "mirror" to real electrical oscillations produced by neurons in the cerebral cortex, which are recorded by surface sensors on the scalp.

Read the full article here at Science daily