The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young - TED Video

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young is the Creator and Director of Arrowsmith School and Arrowsmith Program, and the author of the international best-selling book The Woman Who Changed Her Brain.

She holds a B.A.Sc. in Child Studies from the University of Guelph, and a Master's degree in School Psychology from the University of Toronto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education).

Arrowsmith-Young is recognized as the creator of one of the first practical applications of the principles of neuroplasticity to the treatment of learning disorders. Her program is implemented in 54 schools internationally.

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Assistive listening devices drive neuroplasticity in children with dyslexia

Children with dyslexia often exhibit increased variability in sensory and cognitive aspects of hearing relative to typically developing peers.

Assistive listening devices (classroom FM systems) may reduce auditory processing variability by enhancing acoustic clarity and attention.

We assessed the impact of classroom FM system use for 1 year on auditory neurophysiology and reading skills in children with dyslexia.

FM system use reduced the variability of subcortical responses to sound, and this improvement was linked to concomitant increases in reading and phonological awareness.

Moreover, response consistency before FM system use predicted gains in phonological awareness. A matched control group of children with dyslexia attending the same schools who did not use the FM system did not show these effects.

Assistive listening devices can improve the neural representation of speech and impact reading-related skills by enhancing acoustic clarity and attention, reducing variability in auditory processing.

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A Profile of Paula Tallal Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience

A Profile of Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience & Professor II. Her Faculty is the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience

Correcting Language Problems Through Neuroplasticity

Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems.

That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.

With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development.

For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning.

What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."

Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain's neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. 

Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment.

In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language.

The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.

In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long.

Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes.

If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences.

That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes and if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent.

That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.

Her current research is focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties.

In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development.

Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.

A woman's new thinking turns heads - Using the brain's Neuroplasticity

When Barbara Arrowsmith-Young realised her brain wasn't working, she changed it. Now others are following her.

IT'S the kind of memory that stays with you. When she was in first grade, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's Canadian primary school teacher told her mother, in her presence, that she had some kind of "mental block", and would never be able to learn.

 Now that she has helped more than 4000 learning-disabled children overcome precisely that kind of diagnosis, of course, she can laugh at it. But she didn't at the time.

Arrowsmith-Young, now 61, talks fluently and passionately and with great erudition. She has a masters degree in school psychology. She has published a groundbreaking, widely praised and enthralling book called The Woman Who Changed Her Brain.

But back at school — indeed, up until she was in her mid-20s — she was desperate. Tormented and often depressed. She did not know what was wrong.

On the one hand, she was brilliant. She had near total auditory and visual memory. "I could listen to the 6 o'clock news, and reproduce it word-for-word at 11pm," she says. "I could open a book, read the first sentence, the second, the third, visualise them. I could memorise whole exercise books."

On the other hand, she was a dolt. "I didn't understand anything. Meaning just never crystallised. Everything was fragmented, disconnected."

She could recite film scripts, but not grasp the relationship between the hands of a clock to tell the time. So in exams, she often got 100 per cent.

Other times, whenever the task involved reasoning, logic, connection, interpretation, or when she simply pulled in the wrong information from her memory, she would get 10 per cent.

"The teachers did not understand," she says. "At school I used to get the strap, for not trying. They really thought I wasn't trying."

Her mother, a teacher, devised a series of flash cards with numbers and letters and, by dint of much hard work, she achieved literacy and numeracy, of a sort.

"For a long time, I reversed almost every letter and number," she says. "I was just not attaching meaning to symbols."

In secondary school, and later at university, she disguised her learning disabilities by working 20 hours a day: "I used to hide in the bathroom when the security guards came around the college library at night, then come back out and carry on."

The breakthrough came when she was 26. A fellow student gave her a book by a Russian neuro-psychologist, Aleksandr Luria: The Man with a Shattered World.

The book contained Luria's research and reflections on the writings of a highly intelligent Russian soldier, Lyova Zazetsky, who had been shot in the brain at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, and recorded in great detail his subsequent disabilities.

For the first time, Arrowsmith says, "I recognised somebody describing exactly what I experienced. His expressions were the same: living life in a fog.

His difficulties were the same: he couldn't tell the time from a clock, he couldn't understand bigger and smaller without drawing pictures, he couldn't tell the difference between the sentences 'the boy chases the dog' and 'the dog chases the boy'. I began to see that maybe an area of my brain wasn't working."

Reading Luria's research, Arrowsmith-Young learned that the bullet that struck Zazetsky had lodged in his left occipital-temporal-parietal region — the critical junction where, in principle, all incoming information from the lobes responsible for sight, sound, language and touch is synthesised, analysed and made sense of.

She realised that, in all probability, this was the region of her own brain that had been malfunctioning since birth.

Then she read about the work of Mark Rosenzweig, an American researcher who found that laboratory rats given a rich and stimulating environment, with play wheels and toys, developed larger brains than those kept in a bare cage.

Rosenzweig concluded that the brain continues developing, reshaping itself based on life experiences, rather than being fixed at birth: a concept known as neuroplasticity.

Arrowsmith-Young decided that if rats could grow bigger and better brains, so could she. So she started devising brain stimulation exercises for herself that would work the parts of her brain not functioning.

Read the full article here: A woman's new thinking turns heads