>>: Welcome everyone. It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young to Microsoft. It’s really a real great
pleasure for me personally to have you come and speak to a Microsoft
audience. This is something that I know I have been thinking about for
a long-time and thanks’ to a vote of other folks who are very familiar
with your work we were able to make this happen. So we are really
looking forward to it.
I just wanted to say very few words and then leave most of the time for
Barbara to have a chance to speak and then also I think we will have
ample time for Q and A. I think it was in 2008 that I read the Norman
Doidge book, The Brain That Changes Itself, and I came across Barbara’s
work. This was in the summer of 2008 and in the fall of 2008 we were
enrolled with our youngest daughter in Vancouver at the Eaton
Arrowsmith program and ever since then both Barbara’s life story as
well as her life’s work have been a real inspiration for us as a
family. I think that as you will hear in the talk today and as you
will read in her book what she has been able to do is tremendous in the
sense of being able to take adversity and turn it into a program that
now can take and have such broad impact with anybody with learning
disabilities I think is just an amazing feat and I think is a thing
that inspires me beyond the field of LD.
When I think about Microsoft I would say the one thing that I know
there are a lot of parents here and for anyone who has learning
disabilities or anyone who is a parent obviously this work that Barbara
has done, her vision of how to make that much more ubiquitous is a
personal relevance and that I think is amazing. The other thing I
would also say is from a Microsoft perspective for us to reflect if you
look at the genesis of this company it has all been about democratizing
technology and improving and empowering lives. The idea of being able
to take the technology that we have and then marry it with the
neuroscience and education has tremendous implications in terms of how
you can have societal impact.
The other side of it is if you look at, in fact, Microsoft research is
perhaps doing some of the leading work around AI and the frontiers of
AI and you look at the new theories of even AI, because AI started out
thinking, “Let’s ignore the brain” and now I think we are coming a full
circle to say, “Let’s in fact think about the anatomy of the brain and
the neural cortex perhaps even as an inspiration or a constraint of how
you build intelligent systems”. And I think Jeff Hawkins and his work
there has perhaps been the most inspiring work in that field and I
think it has implications on how we even think about building
intelligent systems.
And then you marry it with this concept of racing with the machine,
because when we think about building software and you really want to
build it in such a way that it really get’s augmented by the machine
then I would say that Barbara’s work has perhaps implications far
beyond the specific place where it’s being deployed today and I think
that’s one of the other things that I would sort of encourage those of
you who have come in here and think of this more as a computer science,
neuroscience and data.
One of the things that Barbara will elude to is that this is not just
one curriculum, but it’s a curriculum that’s learning and I think
there’s a lot that many, both on the research side and the product side
at Microsoft that we can both learn and then perhaps contribute back,
because Barbara’s vision is not just not just about having a program in
a few schools, but it’s about being able to make is accessible to every
student and every teacher and change the face of education as it really
meets the frontiers of neuroscience and perhaps computer science.
So with that let me turn it over to Barbara, thank you very much.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Thank you, thank you [indiscernible].
[clapping]
Thank you. The microphone is on? Okay, so I want to thank you
[indiscernible] for that lovely introduction and Eric for making this
possible and Amy also for making this possible and allowing me to come
and speak about what I am passionate about. I try to compress my talk,
but it’s probably somewhere in the order of about an hour. Then I am
open for questions and answers and I hope you enjoy the journey as I
kind of take you into the territory of the brain. And my story is a
journey into the territory of the brain and really what happens when
there are cognitive glitches or there are things that are not working
properly.
And if we think about this incredibly complex organ that we really
can’t escape, we carry it with us everywhere we go. It has something
on the order of 86 billion neurons and if we think about the world’s
population at about 7 to 8 billion it kind of puts it into perspective
in terms of the complexity. And also we have hundreds of trillions of
connections in our brain. And again if we think about all the stars in
the Milky Way galaxy we actually have more connections in our brain
than all of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined.
And to me what’s really fascinating is no two brains are exactly alike.
I mean if you think about the person sitting next to you, or think
about a loved on or a family member and you think about the physical
differences between you, like you have different eye color, different
shape of your ears, different finger prints, there are actually more
differences between your two brains then all those physical differences
combined. So neuroscience has taught us that our brain does shape us.
It makes us uniquely who we are. Really, it filters our perceptions
and understanding of ourselves, of other people, of our world and our
relationship to that world.
And to me what’s most promising is this whole concept of neural
plasticity. We now know that the brain is capable of change and that’s
it capable of change across our life span. I have worked with students
as young as 6 and as old as 81 and I have seen neural plasticity and as
I am getting a little bit older I am actually quite encouraged that
there is neural plasticity as we age. And what that means is that the
brain changes at a physiological level, more dendrites, increased
neurotransmitters, and that change leads to more efficient and more
effective learning.
And my story begins with my brain and really it’s a personal story and
it’s a universal story. The personal was my journey for a solution to
a very, very severe and crippling learning disabilities and the
universal is that we all have a brain and if we can understand how it
functions I think we can have more compassionate understanding of
ourselves and also of others. So for me growing up I lived in a world
that was really pretty incomprehensible. There was part of my brain, I
was later to learn, that wasn’t working properly and it was the part of
the brain that attaches meaning to things which allows you to
comprehend or understand.
And for me it was almost like if I listened to language it was about
intelligible as Lewis Carroll’s The Jabberwocky. I could hear the
words, but my brain struggled to attach meaning to those words. If
something was really concrete, somebody said it was raining outside,
which I understand it does quite often in Settle, I could conjure up
image because that was concrete. I could paint a picture in my head
I could understand that, but as soon as it got into a relationship I
struggled with that. So if we think about numbers I can understand
what 1 is because I can see one object. I can understand what 4 is
because I can line up 4 objects, if you put that one over top of the
and it meant nothing to me because that’s a relationship and I could
not understand relationships. I couldn’t understand how part was
related to a whole.
as
an
so
4
Things as simple as my aunt, I really couldn’t understand how could she
be my aunt and be my mother’s sister? I mean how can somebody have two
relationships? It really made no sense to me and my notebooks were
filled with drawings and diagrams because I was trying to use my right
hemisphere to draw pictures to understand what I couldn’t understand in
language. And something as simple as telling time, I couldn’t read a
clock, because to interpret time you have to understand the
relationship between the hour hand and the minute hand to know what
that time was. So up until age 25, age 26, I could not read a clock.
Thing as simple as jokes, I didn’t understand jokes because how do you
understand the joke? You hear the irony, kind of the “jux” to position
of the language, the things that make it humorous. So like individuals
with learning problems I learned compensations. So what I would do is
I would match my laughter to the laughter of the other children because
that would tell me how funny the joke would be, but I had no idea why
it was funny. Things like con artists, I was incredibly vulnerable to
con artists because how do you tell if you’re being coned? You hear
the logical inconsistencies in what somebody is saying. Well for me
there was no logic in my world so obviously there were no logical
inconsistencies. So it meant that I had a lot of trouble understanding
if somebody was being genuinely authentic or if they were telling me a
story.
And making decisions was really hard for me, it was paralyzing, because
how do you make a decision? You compare and contrast; you weight
alternatives. I couldn’t do that because weighing alternatives you are
comparing one thing to the next. You are seeing a relationship or a
connection. In my world there were no relationships, there were no
connections. I got labeled as being rigid, as being stubborn. And I
was rigid and I was stubborn and change was really hard for me, but it
wasn’t coming from an emotional place, it was coming from a cognitive
difficulty because I couldn’t hold those pieces of information to
understand.
So if I finally did figure out something I wanted to hold onto that for
dear life, because it always felt that if somebody else said, “Well
look at it over this way” I had to let go of what I had come to figure
out over here, which was hard one to allow this to integrate and it
just felt too hard for me. And what happened over time was that a
really fragmented view of my world led to a very fragmented psyche; a
very fragmented personality where my self-esteem, my self-concept was
really, really impacted.
And if that wasn’t enough, that was one area, I had another area of my
brain that wasn’t working properly. I was a klutz; I was incredibly
uncoordinated. The whole left side of my body was like an alien being.
I could put my left hand on a hot burner and I felt pain, but the part
of my brain that registered where that sensation was coming from didn’t
work. So somebody that didn’t have that problem would feel the pain,
register it’s in their hand and pull their hand away. I didn’t, I
would leave my hand on the hot burner and unless I looked I didn’t know
where the pain was coming from and what I needed to do. My mother was
convinced that I would be dead by the age of 5 because I was so
accident prone.
I had bruises and cuts and dents on that left side of
my body and I had no idea where they came from.
And I kept my fingernails really short because if I put my hair behind
my eye with my left hand I might scratch my eye out. So I truly was a
danger to myself with that difficulty. And if that wasn’t enough there
was another problem, another part of my brain that wasn’t working. I
didn’t understand 3 dimensional spaces. So I couldn’t construct maps
in my head. And as a child I would get lost in my friends house
because I couldn’t construct a map of how those rooms related.
So I didn’t know how to get from one room to the next and I would get
paralyzed and lost. Things like geometry and geography were really
hard for me because you have to construct spatial relations and
something as simple as crossing the street that we all take for
granted, that was terrifying to me, because when you are crossing the
street you have to create a mental map of where you are relative to
that car that’s coming at you.
Well, I couldn’t create that map so again, like children with learning
problems did or do I created a compensation and that would be walk
blocks out of my way to find a stop sign or stoplight where I knew the
cars had to stop so it would be safe to cross or the other strategy was
that I would wait at the side of the road for however long it took
until somebody else came along to cross. And I would follow them
across the street and I would hope that they knew what they were doing
a lot better than I did.
And my joke was that I would be as successful crossing the street with
my eyes open as with my eyes closed and there was truth to that. And
if you can kind of think of what my world was like I wasn’t good
academically because I didn’t understand concepts. I struggled in
relationships with people because I didn’t understand what they were
saying and I certainly was not an asset to any sports team. I mean I
was the last child chosen for any athletic activity and rightfully so
because my reaction if a ball was coming at me would be to run as
quickly as I could in the opposite direction, because more than likely
I would end up connecting somehow with that ball in a very painful way.
So there was really, for me in school, no area or arena where I was
successful. And when I began school, and that was a long time ago in
the 1950s, this was the time of what I call the Pre-Neuroplastic
Paradigm. When I started grade 1 the belief was that your brain is
fixed. Basically the brain you are born with is the brain you are
going to die with and there is nothing you can do about it if you have
a problem. You just need to learn to accept or live with it. And in
grade 1 I overheard my teacher tell my mother that I had a mental
block. Because at that time there wasn’t even the term learning
disability, it didn’t exist. So I had a mental block, I was told that
I would never learn like other children, that I was slow and that I had
to accept that limitation.
And that was my message; the message was really clear. In grade 1 I
was sentenced to a lifetime of struggle and pain. And there were a lot
of dark moments. I mean this is me in grade 8. It was right around
the time I attempted suicide because I couldn’t imagine how I could go
to high school, elementary school was such a struggle and I just felt
that I could not handle it. The mixed blessing was because my learning
disability I didn’t understand things I got the instructions wrong so I
wasn’t successful on the attempt which allowed me then to create this
work. So, you know, there is kind of a mixed blessing to things.
And I just, I think partly I was very blessed. This was my father, he
was an inventor and had patents and I grew up in a family where the
belief was if there is a problem and there is no solution don’t be
limited by the conventional wisdom that there is no solution for this
problem. He instilled in me that you go out and create your solution.
It’s kind of the moral imperative that you need to go out and hunt for
solutions. So that set me on my life’s path to really try to find a
solution to the difficulties that I had.
And that solution came in the work of a brilliant Russian
neuropsychologist, the fellow with the glasses in this picture,
Alexander Luria. And he was doing a lot of work after World War II in
Russia with Russian solders that had very localized head wounds as a
result of trauma in the war. And the other gentleman in this picture
is Lyova Zazetsky and in the battle of Smolensk in 1943 Zazetsky
suffered a bullet wound to a part of his left hemisphere. And Zazetsky
started to keep a journal describing his difficulties. And Luria took
this journal and wrote a book called The Man with the Shattered World.
And in August of 1977, I remember the day really well; someone gave me
a copy of this book which changed my life. And in this book, in
Zazetsky’s journal he was using the exact same language to describe his
difficulties that I was using in my journal in the 1060s, talking about
living in a fog where meaning was a femoral, where it just kind of
disappeared into a mist that you couldn’t grasp things or hold onto
things. And this was a man who was brilliant mathematically before the
wound, who could tell time before the wound, and afterwards he couldn’t
tell time, he could understand fractions, all the things that I hadn’t
been able to do from birth he couldn’t do after the wound.
So I knew that I didn’t have a bullet in my head, but now I knew what
the source of my problem was. It was part of my brain in the left
hemisphere, the Angular Gyrus that wasn’t working properly. And
obviously to create a solution to a problem you have to first
understand what the source of the problem is. So now I knew what my
problem was and if we think about this area, like to get a feel or
sense of this area. It’s an area that builds concepts or builds ideas
and probably a lot of people in this room are really good in this area.
So if you think about the palm of your hand as a concept, an idea or a
construct and you think about your fingers as all the elements that
have to come together and the synthesis to build that concept, or that
construct or that idea that’s what this area does. So if we take a
really simple concept, a cat which we are probably all familiar with
and we think it’s nocturnal, it’s a carnivore, it has good night
vision, fur bearing, retractable claws, all of those elements have to
come together to build that idea, that concept. If you have a problem
in this part of the brain at the level that I did or the level that
Zazetsky theses pieces always remain disconnected, they never come
together in a meaningful way. So you can never build concepts, you can
never build ideas, you can’t grasp ideas and that was my challenge.
And so what do I do about it? Now I know where the problem so the next
piece of the solution came in the work of Mark Rosenzweig who is a
psychologist at the University at Berkeley in California. And he was
one of the very early researchers looking at neuroplasticity and he was
working with rats, because they are often easier to work with than
humans. And what he did is he put rats in different environments, so
he put a rat in a cage with lots of other rats and lots of toys to play
with and he called that an enriched environment. And then he put a
group of rats in an environment with other rats but with less
stimulation and then he put that poor little rat all by itself with not
much to do.
And what he did after they had been exposed to these different
environments is he ran them on a maze test, which is like a little
intelligence test for rats. And what he found that the group of rats
that were in that enriched environment learned much more effectively on
the maze, much more efficiently and much more effectively compared to
the other two groups. And then because they were rats he was able to
look at their brains afterwards. And what he found was the brains had
changed psychologically. This was early, early proof of
neuroplasticity. And this research has been replicated thousands, and
thousands of times now.
What he found is there are more dendrites. If you think about the
neurons the dendrites are the branches that create the synapses which
allow for more connections, which is really important in
neurotransmission. There were actually more neurotransmitters, more
Glia cells, which are important for neurotransmission and large
capillaries, so more blood flowing to the different brain areas. So
what it meant was that the brains had changed as a result of the
stimulation, which is neuroplasticity. And that change had lead to
better learning.
And then he did what I thought was a really interesting experiment. He
put a group of rats in a very tactile environment and he blindfolded
them so he couldn’t see. So the only way they could navigate through
their environment was through sense of touch. And after that
experiment when he looked at their brains he found that it was a very
specific part of the brain that had changed. That part that I had the
difficulty with that didn’t register sensation had changed. And for me
that was my ah-hah moment because it told me differential stimulation
leads to differential effect. So if I could find an exercise or an
activity that could stimulate that specific part of my brain possibly I
could change it.
And at that time nobody was really looking at human neuroplasticity,
but naively or optimistically I had to believe that humans had as much
neuroplasticity as rats and hopefully we had more neuroplasticity than
rats even though nobody was suggesting that. So I set out to create
the first exercise to stimulate my cognitive functioning. And what did
I pick? I picked clocks because all the research that Luria had done,
and my experience and Zazetsky’s experience was if there is damage to
this area you cannot tell time. And it wasn’t that I wanted to get
better at telling time, which I did, but I wanted to force that part of
my brain to process relationships and that was a way, like a window in.
I believe there are multiple windows into the different cognitive
functioning. This was the window I found into that part of the brain.
And so I started; I was pretty abysmal at the beginning, like I
couldn’t tell time. I was 26 I had to have a friend help me. We would
write down the time and he would turn the hands of the clock, I would
try to read it, but over time like hundreds of hours of practice
eventually I could start to read those clocks. And I could read them
accurately; I could read them really quickly. And that was great, I
could read a two handed clock, I could tell time, but I wasn’t really
experiencing any cognitive change. So I knew I had to make it more
complex so I added a third hand. And then did that whole level of the
exercise. So now I could read an hour, minute and second hand on the
clock. And that was great and then I added a fourth hand. And that’s
when, for me, I had my breakthrough, when I mastered the four handed
clocks, which is like processing four relationships simultaneously.
And what happened was my world just expanded. I could do things that
with the best will in the world I had never been able to do before.
Before I talked about how I lived in what I called “lag-time”. I was
hours behind everyone else in processing information or understanding
concepts and often I never could. I had a verbatim auditory memory.
So I would listen to conversations and I would memorize them and then I
walk away and for two hours afterwards I would play those conversations
over, and over and over again, trying to understand what had been
discussed.
And if I was able to understand what had been discussed it was long
after the conversation and everyone else had left. So there was no
opportunity to be part of that conversation or that discussion. Now I
could actually listen as the conversation was unfolding, I could
understand, I could participate, I could interject my thoughts, I could
understand if they were responding and it was incredible for me, that I
could actually be part of that dialogue and that conversation.
And before when I read anything I would have to read a page in a book
five times, ten times, fifteen times, twenty times and what Luria
talked about if you had this difficulty, and it was my experience, is
you can never verify meaning. So as you are reading something you are
always hypothesizing, I think this is what it means, bit I am never
sure, which leads to a tremendous sense of uncertainty in your world.
Now I could read and I could understand as I was reading.
And then I decided to go back in and teach myself all of mathematics.
My father had been a mathematician and a physicists and he had always
told me math was beautiful, right. It has this majesty, and poetry,
and tapestry, and logic and I would say, “Sure dad, whatever”, but I
certainly didn’t experience it. And now I could actually see what he
had been talking about, because I could understand math from first
principles and grasp the logic behind it, which I hadn’t been able to
before.
And what really I found quite remarkable, which I had not at all
anticipated happened, was every night after I had this change when I
went to bed it wasn’t something I intended to do, but images would come
up from my life, from like age 4 until 26. And I would start to
understand why things had happened in my life. And I would say, “Okay,
this happened because of that”, because before there had been no cause
and effect. Because to make a relationship, like to understand cause
and effect you have to see the relationship. And now it felt like my
psyche got realigned because I could understand why things happened
whereas before I felt I was always kind of buffeted by random events
with no meaning behind them.
And since then I have worked with a number of psychiatrists in Toronto
and Norman Doidge, MD, FRCP(C) is one of them who refers some of his
clients to me because if you have this problem you can’t gain insight.
You can’t benefit from insight therapy because what’s insight? You
have to make those kinds of connections. And it’s interesting, these
psychiatrists’s know, they know this individual must be at this level
of those cognitive exercises because now they can start to make
insight. And insight is really important for our functioning in the
world.
And I have also had some students that come to me that are misdiagnosed
as having Aspergers and they have severe problems in this area, so they
can’t attach meaning and their world is incredibly confusing. And it’s
a misdiagnosis in those cases, we address this function, they can
relate, their world has meaning. And just quickly to get an idea of
the complexity, because what I wanted to do with this area, I saw my
change after the [indiscernible] level, in all of the exercises I have
created I try to bring that function, if at all possible, up to an
average level.
And this is what I call lovingly the “10 handed clock”. This is the
highest level in this reasoning. So for somebody to function and
interpret this is reading 10 relationships simultaneously. It goes all
the way from the millennium century decade down to millisecond. And
someone who masters this can do this in 5 seconds, which is like a
mental workout. And I knew I was onto something when I invented this
level because only two people have ever walked through the door of my
school and have been able to look at this and interpret it. And one
was an astronomer from the University of Maryland who was one of the
people who discovered radio emitting galaxies and the other person was
a physicist from Harvard. So I knew that I was really onto something.
There are probably some people here, I am sure, at Microsoft that could
interpret this, but the idea is to really force the cognitive function
or process in that area.
So once I saw that change I thought, can I create an exercise that will
really address that really uncoordinated part of my body? And it
really was a danger. I had fallen off the wrong end of a diving board
and fractured a tooth. I had actually slammed a car door on my head
with this left hand and re-fractured that tooth. It was like this was
an alien part of my body and it would do things. If I wasn’t watching
it, it would actually do things that weren’t in my best interest. And
then by extension when I learned how to drive if I didn’t know where
the left side of my body was I didn’t know where the left side of that
car was. So the left side of my car was banged, dented and damaged.
So I thought to create an exercise here I knew had to do something with
my eyes closed, because how do I compensate with my eyes open? So I
created an exercise where I had to draw really complex shapes
eventually with my left hand until I could be as accurate with my eyes
closed as with my eyes open. And the only way I could do that was
through registering very, very fine sensation. And now I am functional
on that left side of my body. My car doesn’t spend any time in the
auto body shop which is really good and I am not bruised, banged and
dented on that side of my body, which is a relief. And I can do
things, like before I could not have picked up with glass or if I had
Sandra probably would be wearing it there in the audience because I
wouldn’t know what my hand would do with it, so I addressed that part.
And then I thought, “Okay, can I do that region of the brain that’s
related to spatial navigation and for me any piece of paper that said
some assembly required struck fear into my heart, because you have to
go from a 2 dimensional representation to construct 3 dimensional
objects. Like IKEA, you know anybody who has ever built anything from
IKEA, like for me the bookcases, the backs were upside and backwards,
or the shelves were upside down, or if I sewed from a pattern,
everything I had to rip seams out all the time because I would sew
things upside down, there were no maps in my head.
And also whenever I would go anyplace new I always calculated in what I
called “lost time”. I would have to add an hour at a minimum to any
new location that I was going to, because I knew I would get lost
multiple times before I finally found my way because there were no maps
in my head. You can tell somebody that has maybe a mild problem in
this area if they are driving, and the map is here and they have to
turn the map in the direction they are going. That’s kind of an
indication that they may have a trouble with that mental rotation. For
me it was even worse; there were no maps in my head.
And some of these problems are hereditary and interestingly my mother
had this difficulty and one of my four brothers had this difficulty.
And my mother did have a good attitude about things so she would say
whenever we got into the car to go anywhere that we were having an
adventure. And we always knew where we were starting and we knew where
wanted to end up, but it was truly a black hole in between, like there
were not maps in either of our heads. And we always got where we were
intending to get to, but we never got there the same way twice. So we
saw a lot of interesting territory.
And as I got older I once asked her, “Had this had an impact on her
life”? And she shared with me that she had wanted to be chemist and
she had gone to her first year university to study chemistry and her
professor had suggested that she actually pick a different major
because she couldn’t construct molecules. If you think about those
molecules, right, that you have to construct in 3 dimensional
representations, 3 dimensional space she could not do this because
there were no maps, no ability to construct 3 dimensional spaces.
My brother who has this problem at a lesser degree did become a
chemist, because these things work on a continuum, nobody has them
exactly to the same degree, but he couldn’t become an organic chemist
because he could construct the molecules, but it was too much effort.
So he became a physical chemist. So what I have learned is no part of
the brain is irrelevant or unimportant. If there is a difficulty in
any part it will have some impact on peoples functioning.
So this began my life’s work. So I went back into Luria’s work and
what I came to understand is each one of us has our own unique
cognitive profile and for individuals who are struggling with learning
is when multiple areas come together to make the learning process
difficult. And the work that I have developed I can now identify and
have programs, cognitive programs to stimulate functions in 19
different areas from non-verbal reading of interpretations in
situations, auditory memory, motor plans for writing, visual memory for
simple patterns and in order to address a problem that somebody has you
need to understand it’s very nature, because you have to target that
difficulty to change it. I mean that is how the brain works, you need
very targeted stimulation.
And what’s very interesting, I learned a lot from the students that I
work with and from the parents that I work with and one parent said to
me very aptly, “School is just a metaphor for life”. If you have these
kinds of problems they aren’t going to stop at the classroom door.
They are going to follow the person out through life. And what Luria
talked about he described the brain as a functional system. We now
talk about neural networks. It’s the same concept. There is no one
part of the brain that reads or that writes. Whenever we do any kind
of intellectual task multiple areas come together to carry out that
task and each one of those areas has its own job, its own function and
it can be involved in multiple tasks. So if you have a problem it can
affect a number of activities.
And this is a [indiscernible] that just illustrates. This came out of
Sweden and this is the brain reading out loud. So you can see there is
no one area that is involved in reading. There are areas that remember
the look of the word, the visual pattern of the letters. There are
areas that discriminate speech sound, because you have to hear the
sounds to be able to then attach the sounds to the letters. There are
parts of the brain that are critical in eye tracking in reading. There
are parts of the brain in the Broca’s that is involved in the
phonological aspect or processing. All of these areas have to come
together for somebody to be able to read easily.
And anybody that works with children who are struggling with reading
knows that you can have five children that are having reading
difficulties and each one can have a different profile depending on
what combination of these areas are impacted. And there are some
students that I see that have all of these areas impacted. And those
are the ones who walk through the door and might be in grade 10 and are
reading at grade 2 because they have not part of the brain that can
support the reading process. And obviously to address any problem we
have to be targeting the specific area that the individual has to give
them strength in that area so that they can go forward with reading.
And if we think about special education processes or approaches they
all have benefit and certainly growing up I used everything that was
possible. So they are what I call compensatory processes or
approaches, which are the child can’t write you give them voice
recognition software which can be of great help. So the concept here
is we are working around the deficit. We are finding a strength or
technology to support the area of difficulty, but we are not changing
the area of difficulty. And then there is what I call content/skill
based approaches and these are ones where you have to learn how to read
and there are multiple reading programs out there and what the best
will do is look at the cognitive profile of individual and if they are
strong phonologically, but poor in visual recognition you pick a
program like Phono-Graphix to teach reading that calls on their
strength. And then there is strategy based approaches which are of
benefit where you are going to learn a rule or a strategy, like
metacognition that you can apply to solve a problem and you learn where
you use those strategies, what kinds of problems they solve.
But, all of these approaches come out of what I call the pre-neural
plastic paradigm. They all come out of the idea that the learner is
fixed. We are not changing the learner using these approaches, we are
accepting the cognitive profile of that learner and we are adapting the
curriculum to that profile. And then there are programs that I call
compacity based, which my program is. There is Cogmed and there are
some other programs that are being developed and here the principal is
that we are actually going to change the learner. We are actually
going to change the fundamental cognitive capacity of the learner so
they can learn curriculum. They can learn strategies; they can learn
content and these approaches and my approach come out of neuroscience,
not out of education. And here we believe we can actually change the
functioning of the learner.
And if we think about this concept of neuroplasticity, which we hear a
lot about often we think it’s a positive thing. It really is a neutral
phenomenon. It just means that the brain is capable of change as a
result of experience or stimulation. It can change in negative ways,
actually there is research now to show that certain long-term exposure
to things like chronic stress, sleep deprivation, we are a society of
people who are sleep deprived, chronic pain, prolonged anxiety,
actually changes the brain at a physiological level in a negative way.
And there are things that can increase the positive aspects of
neuroplasticity, make the brain function more efficiently and
effectively.
And really, what we want to do in our lives and in our practices
working with people is, as much as possible, to increase those positive
factors and reduce the negative factors. And the principals of the
program that I have developed are really working to enhance those
positive factors related to positive brain change. So the first one,
as I have said and I have talked about, is design a design a task
that’s very targeted to the specific cognitive function to stimulate
it. And the next piece is you have to start the level of difficulty,
you have to calibrate the level of difficulty of the task to the
current functioning that the individual is holding at. So we do that
through and assessment process.
So if the cognitive functioning in areas is here we are not going to
start the exercise up here because the brain is going to spin wheels,
it is not going to engage and it’s just going to be frustrating. And
that’s a lot of the experience of these children in school. If we
start it way down here, again there will be no stimulation, there will
be no effortful processing, and it’s not going to change the brain. So
we have to start the level of difficulty just slightly above the
current holding capacity to stimulate that function. And then the
function comes up, then we step up the level of difficulty.
And we have to remove the support of the other areas that we normally
compensate and that is one of the hardest things I have found for
individuals with learning difficulties, because their compensations
have been life saving. I mean I know all the compensations I developed
allowed me to function to a certain degree and here we are saying we
want to take those away, because as soon as the student compensates in
an activity it means they are diverting energy to other parts of the
brain which is limiting the stimulation to the area that we are trying
to target. And I have seen so many different creative ways that
students compensate. There was that exercise that I created for what I
call the kinesthetic, the registering of sensation and I had a student
as I was watching them I knew they weren’t doing it quite correctly and
I couldn’t tell why.
So I asked her what she was doing, and she was a musician, and instead
of registering the sensation as her body was moving she had memorized
musical phrases and she knew exactly the length of the phrase that told
her when her muscles had to stop. So we worked with her to help her
understand why that wouldn’t support changing her brain and eventually
she could drop out that compensation and she did work on that area and
actually went on to win some major badminton championship because she
could now coordinate her body, space and hit the birdie with the
racket.
And then we build in performance criteria. In every single exercise
the student has to be 90 percent or better, because for cognitive
functioning to be holding in an area it has to be really accurate or
it’s not processing effectively at that level. It has to be
consistent. If the student get’s 90 percent once that’s wonderful, but
they have to do it over a run of trials and they have to be automatic.
If something is taking them an hour and it should take five seconds we
have to get them down to the five seconds. And once they meet these
criteria then the level of difficulty steps up and sometimes we have
students say, you know, after they have mastered something they want to
just go on cruise control and enjoy that mastery. But just to know, as
soon as your brain is on cruise control you are not stimulation
function. And it’s nice to be on cruise control, but it’s not
stimulating cognitive change.
And sometimes you know, people ask why we insist on these mastery
criteria? And there are other cognitive programs out there. But, for
the brain to really change in a meaningful way it needs to be really,
solidly processing at that level and if we stop our training before it
meets these criteria we haven’t got that cognitive function up to the
level that we need it. And I have tracked people over 30 years out of
the program and what I see there is no drop off of function. Once the
cognitive area is solidly there they just start to use their brain in
their everyday activity in that neural network and it get’s its own
stimulation, so they don’t have to continue to do the exercises because
we have really got that section of the brain up and functioning solidly
at that level.
So if you want to kind of try an activity to see where you are on a
continuum of one of the cognitive functions there is a part of brain, I
call it symbol recognition, some researchers call it the brains letter
box, or visual word form area. So if you want to think of the word
cat, it’s a fairly simple word and you want to close your eyes and see.
Can you actually see that word in your minds eye or almost like it’s
projected up on a blackboard? And some people will be able to see it
really crisply and really clearly, other people it might be a fuzzy
image. The children or individuals that have problems here will just
see the back of their eyelids or just black, they will not see the
letters. And those are the children that are going to be dyslexic or
struggle with reading.
So, if we think about this area, if you are strong here, this is that
visual photographic memory for text. A person can look at something
and just visually remember it. So they are going to learn reading
patterns, spelling patterns. If they struggle here this is the child
that will read the same word, or see the same word five times on a page
and have trouble reading it each time because they don’t hold the look
of the word. Obviously they are going to be slow in reading, they are
going to struggle with spelling, any kind of visual, even learning
visual like chemical equations, any kind of visual template learning
math formula is going to be hard for them to learn.
And what we do for this area, this is one of the exercises, this is the
Amharic from Ethiopia and people ask why do I use foreign languages?
Well again, I don’t want students to be able to compensate. I want to
be stimulating that visual part of the brain that holds symbol
patterns. So if I used English they could put sound to it, they could
put meaning to it, there would be familiarity. It wouldn’t be just
stressing that part of the brain and there are multiple different
languages that I have built into the computer. And by the time a child
can memorize and hold in their minds eye 8 Chinese characters, English
actually is pretty easy to learn the visual symbol patterns. It’s not
that I want them to get proficient at Chinese, but I want to stimulate
that cognitive function so that part of the brain holds visual symbol
patterns.
And what changes as a result of this, we have got a lot of research
studies that are on the website if people are interested, it’s
Arrowsmithschool.org. We know that students with learning problems
don’t learn a year for a year. So this was a group on the Toronto
Catholic District School Board in Toronto which is a publically funded
school board and they were learning at 2/3 of a year per year prior to
the program. After the program, or partway through the program their
rate of learning doubled and tripled, which to me is the power of a
cognitive program. We are not teaching skills, we are not teaching
spelling, we are not teaching reading, we are changing the brain so
that it can learn the things that it’s designed to learn and it can
pickup the learning everywhere through all of their exposure and their
experience. And then the other study was done at Eaton Arrowsmith
School in Vancouver on the Woodcock Johnson and again showing the kinds
of things that you would expect to change as a result of that cognitive
stimulation.
And then this is the right hemisphere function. We just tried,
actually a left hemisphere function with the word cat. This is can you
imagine a cat, like the actual cat which we have probably all seen and
can you think about a cat, close your eyes and can you actually see a
cat? Can you see it in all its glory, with its ears, and its fur and
its tail? So just see whether you can call up an image of a cat in
your minds eye. And then you can see how well you did on that
continuum, I mean some people who are exceptionally strong here they
can even see the gradation and the shading in the cat’s fur. Other
people kind of see a line drawing or not too many visual elements and
some people don’t see anything.
And this area is a critical in the right hemisphere for remembering
landmarks, remembering the look of a place that you have gone too
before. So if somebody has a difficulty here they get lost, not
because of the way, I had the problem with spatial maps, but they don’t
remember landmarks, they don’t remember the look of a place. They also
will have problem with visual imagery. Somebody that has this
difficulty will not like to meditate, because when you meditate you
call up your happy place, like you conjure up a visual image that calms
you. If somebody has this difficulty they can’t call up those visual
images.
This is the area that Oliver Sacks book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat” is about. I had someone who had traumatic head injury, he
was hit by a truck when I was 11 and he came to me when he was 33 and
he had massive damage to this area and the first day he walked into my
school he tried to walk out a filing cabinet because it looked like a
door to him. It had the same visual elements, it was kind of
rectangular and it had a handle. If he saw me in the school he knew
who I was. If two seconds later he saw me in the hallway he didn’t
know who I was because he couldn’t hold the visual look to match it up
to me.
I often call this the refrigerator dysfunction, because this is the
person, and I think there is some research to say that men have a
little bit more of a difficulty here than women, that the person opens
the refrigerator and says, “Where’s the mustard?” And there it is
right in front of them, but it’s because they don’t hold the visual
look of the object to match it up to what they are looking for. So
someone whit this difficulty will not like to shop because they will
walk by the item they are looking for multiple times.
And I had a garden writer who had this difficulty and if you can image
she couldn’t hold the image of the plants so she would have to use
language, like it was the clematis growing up the fence with the large
purple leaves, which really is pretty limiting if you are trying to
write about gardens. And then if you have the face recognition part as
a difficulty this is a person that will recognize, again their neighbor
on their porch, but two minutes later if their neighbor is walking down
the street they won’t recognize them.
And a friend of mine had this difficulty and we worked on it. She
doesn’t anymore and she was a reporter at the Toronto Star, which is a
big newspaper and for 20 years she rode the same elevator, probably
with the same people, to her workplace and she didn’t recognize who was
on the elevator with her. So she decided her strategy was going to be
friendly to everybody. So she figured some people would think she was
just a little to over friendly, but she felt that it was less likely
result in her offending somebody that she should know, because she
didn’t know if she knew them or not, because she just couldn’t
recognize their faces and now she can.
And then just quickly I will go through a couple of areas, this is a
very easy area to identify. This is you ask a student or ask an
individual to tell you a story and they can tell you an elaborate
story, give them 5 or 10 minutes and they can just talk and talk and
talk. You put a pen in their hand or a pencil, give them the same 5 or
10 minutes and maybe one sentence, two sentences goes down. So they
have got the thought, they have got the content, but it doesn’t
translated into the motor plan, into the written expression. And
students with this difficulty often talk about feeling locked inside
their head, because they can’t externalize on paper what they know. So
it affects writing, obviously, spelling, not because they don’t
remember the visual look of the word, but they don’t remember the motor
plan.
So it just doesn’t fire out in an automatic motor plan. So this is a
student that can spell the same word five different ways on the page
because it comes out differently each time. And it affects reading not
because they don’t remember the visual look of the word, but they can’t
eye track. So this is the student that makes these kinds of reading
errors. So they will have the right letters in the word like calm and
clam, but the eye tracking doesn’t work smoothly or they use their
finger to track because they will lose their place when they are
reading, because the part of the brain that’s developing the well
ordered fixations for tracking is implicated.
And it also affects mathematics. This is the student that will say,
“Please don’t make me show my rough work on the paper. I can do the
calculations in my head”, but they know if they have to write them down
they are going to make mistakes, or they are gong to misread the sign
and they are going to add instead of multiply, or they will miscopy the
question down. The last one I saw I saw a student say 3 into 15 is 5
so she knew the answer, but the last thing she saw was the 3 and that’s
the number that got written down. Teachers will often say to these
students, “You are making careless errors”, they are not careless
errors. These are motor slips; these children do not externalize the
proper motor patterns.
And the exercise for this, she looks like a happy pirate. We use an
eye patch because its motor functioning and the eye motor movements in
the right eye talk to the left pre-motor region and that’s where we are
trying to get more stimulation into that area. And they learn lots,
and lots of motor plans. And we see things like legibility in writing,
amount of writing, the ability for the person to edit, eye tracking,
and reading speeds improves and obviously fewer errors. And a lot of
students with this difficulty, this is a 14 year old boy, print instead
of write, because printing relies on more discrete motor movements and
it places less of a load on that cognitive function.
We don’t work on handwriting, we work on the cognitive and you can see
over time this student’s writing changed from printing and writing to
writing. And that is because the cognitive capacity was in place for
the person to learn these motor plans for writing. This was a student
that was given 10 minutes to write on a topic, this was a year later;
same 10 minutes and it went on for 3 pages. And again, he had all
these ideas in his head. We didn’t put the ideas in his head, but now
he could put them down on paper.
And this was an English teacher describing a student that was going
through this exercise and the changes that she saw in her English work.
And again, you can just see it graphically; I mean it’s more organized.
This is a student if they are writing they will go off the page, around
the corner, they will go onto the desk. Now the student can organize
the motor plan on the page. And this is a student too that
traditionally you hear in psychological reports, “Give the child more
time on the test, because they can’t externalize their thought”. By
the end of this exercise these students can do time tests within the
time limits, they don’t need extra time.
And these are a couple of studies, again they are all on the web site,
showing the kinds of things you would expect to change as a result of
that cognitive function. And this was a study, and some people say,
“We are a little nervous, we are going to take students out of
academics half of a day and do brain exercises”. And, you know, how is
that going to help them learn? Well we learn with our brain, that’s
kind of how it helps them learn, because some of these students can sit
in class forever and they are not going to benefit from the
instruction. And this study I really like because it was done by
somebody who was quite opposed to my program and the Vancouver school
board, the blue is Arrowsmith and the red is Learning Assistance
students.
So those learning assistant students were getting English, they were
getting spelling, they were getting reading, writing every single day
and the Arrowsmith students were getting cognitive exercises. After 8
to 9 months the Arrowsmith students actually did better on spelling and
also on reading comprehension than the Learning Assistance students
even though they weren’t getting exposure to that material, but now
their brain could process that material. And again, to me, this just
points to the power of this work; that it is really with our brain that
we learn and engage in the learning process.
And this is a brochure that is on our website and I think I brought a
few of them here that just summarizes all of the studies and what’s
really exciting is Howard Eaton and I of Eaton-Arrowsmith School formed
a research group about a year ago, I think, and we are now involved in
a research study with the University of Calgary looking at outcome
measures on the Woodcock cognitive achievement in academic and seeing
really, really positive results.
And we are just working with researchers at UBC starting an imaging
study in the next few weeks. We are just finalizing that and also the
University of Southern Illinois doing imaging, because my interest is
finding out, I mean I know the work works, but how can I enhance this
work? How can I actually make it more effective for what I call the
end user, which is the child sitting at that desk that needs this kind
of work? So I am hoping that what we discover in these scans will help
us improve the delivery of the system.
And then my favorite area is what I call artifactual thinking. And
this is probably I should have called it non-verbal thinking, but this
was a lot of years ago and I liked that term. This is really the part
of the brain in the right hemisphere that plans and things nonverbally. One researcher calls it “cognitive goldilocks”, which I
think is really an appropriate term, because it’s the part of the brain
that allows us to project ourselves into a situation before actually
being in that situation and imagine what outcome we want to create.
Then once we get into the situation allow us to problem solve and plan
to see if we are on target to create that outcome and then if not the
strategies we can use to modify our behavior and modify the situation
to create the outcome. So it’s thinking, planning, and problem solving
in the non-verbal realm.
And if somebody is good here, this is a person who can walk into a
situation, read all the subtle cues and nuances and is really socially
apt and socially appropriate. And if they have a problem here this is
the individual who is awkward socially, uncomfortable socially. You
can give them a rule, like in a social situation do X, Y and Z, but
they misapply it. They will apply it to a situation where it doesn’t
really work. And, you know, I believe there is no rule book for life.
You have to be able to generate your rules in all of these different
situations that you come into and that are what this cognitive
functioning allows you to do.
I like to make up terms so I talk about premature closure, which for me
is the student that goes into a situation, or the individual and there
are multiple things happening, they will look at one or two details or
factors, they will make an interpretation and then they will run with
that interpretation, but it isn’t accurate, because it’s only taking a
subset of the information. So it means that they end up getting into
difficulty socially or the other way is this is the person who leaps
before they fully look at the situation.
And this was a picture that I gave to a young girl, she was 12, that
had this difficulty and nobody in her neighborhood would play with her
and she had a reputation, they said she was a teller of tall tales,
which is sort of a nice way to say they thought she was lying a lot,
and it really wasn’t that she was telling tall tales, it was just she
didn’t read situations very well. So I showed her this picture and
asked her what she thought was happening here and she told me they were
playing badminton. So I kept a very straight face and I asked her to
explain why and it’s sort of hard to see, but the woman with her hands
outstretched has netting on her had if you can sort of see that, it’s
easier in the real picture.
And this girl saw the netting, it triggered an association, netting,
badminton, they are playing badminton, a very, very severe premature
closure, like looking at one element and making a whole interpretation.
So it really put into perspective why nobody wanted to play with her in
her neighborhood because she was making these kinds of incorrect
interpretations all the time. And then an 18 year old girl looked at
this picture and told me they were at city hall. And I asked her why
she thought that and she pointed to the rope in the foreground and she
had been to city hall in Toronto and there was a section of the area
outside of the city hall that was cordoned off with a rope, so it
triggered that association. So again, imagine these individuals world
it’s really hard for them to navigate socially.
This is a classic Normal Rockwell picture, the little girl that has
lost her two front teeth and her friend’s reaction to that. And
probably 80 percent of the people who have this difficulty in nonverbal interpretation will look at this picture and say they hare
having a shouting match, because what they are focusing on is the mouth
being open and that triggers an association with a shouting match.
But, I mean they don’t look at all the information. That girl doesn’t
look like she is angry, she actually kind of looks like she is happy
and proud of whatever is going on. And certainly in my world if
somebody is shouting abuse at me I am not going to be leaning in like
the other girl is to hear that more abuse. So the body language
doesn’t fit the interpretation.
And I had a teacher, one of my teachers, her son was in my school, he
was 12 and he had this difficulty. So he was describing this picture
and explaining his interpretation, so she asked if she could take it
home and show her husband. So she walked through the door and held up
the picture and her husband looked at it and said, “Oh, that’s
interesting, they are having a shouting match”. So it shows that these
things are inherited, but also she said it explained a lot in their
marriage. But, he had it to a much less degree then the son had it.
And we have a whole program for this area which stimulates this
function which allows these individuals to have real relationships in
the social world and do all that planning and thinking. We know in the
adolescent class when we are being successful because they start
massively dating, because they can now have all these kind of
relationships. So for awhile they don’t really want to do any more of
the exercise because they are so excited about having relationships,
but it’s a positive thing.
And then I work with individual, obviously, who have attention deficit
or attention hyperactive disorder and in a lot of cases students who
come into the program that are on medication when they walk through the
door by the end of the program 75 to 80 percent of the students are off
medication for a number of reasons. One is what I call cognitive load,
these students are sitting in class with a number of cognitive deficits
and that means it’s really hard for them to attend. They are being
asked to do things in class that take extra energy and effort for them
to attend. And the brain goes refractory, it just get’s exhausted and
then their attention starts to wander and drift and they start to
engage in behaviors that their teachers wish they wouldn’t. And as we
lighten that load by addressing the cognitive function the individual
can sit in class and do what is being required of them and they can
sustain attention.
And then there is a group that have what I call symbolic and
artifactual thinking which is the prefrontal cortex in the right and
left hemisphere and part of the job of that part of the brain is to
keep attention relatively focused towards a goal. It’s very much what
that part of the brain does. It allows you to say, “This information
is important to solve that goal. This information over here is
irrelevant so don’t get distracted by it”. If somebody has a problem
here all information is equally relevant. So the butterfly flying
outside the window is just as important as the math question in front
of them. And again as we address that cognitive part of the brain
comes online to be able to regulate attention and the children,
adolescents and adults can come off of medication.
And then some of the other areas we work on are auditory memory. We
have all sorts of different programs for different aspects of auditory
memory. The child that comes home knows they are supposed to do
homework, but they can’t remember the instructions of what they are
supposed to do. The child that you tell to do three things, they come
back with one or two done and have no recollection of the third thing.
Some adults I know that are writing all over their hands or they have
got Post-It notes all around their house because they know they won’t
remember the information or they are lost if they don’t have their to
do list because they can’t hold the information. These are people who
aren’t going to like books on tape because they are not going to hold
the auditory information. And often they get labeled as irresponsible
because they don’t do what they are asked to do. And they really
aren’t irresponsible; they can’t hold the auditory information.
And then I have a program for what I call quantity blindness. These
are the people that have no sense of number. So for them 10, 100,
1,000 all mean the same thing. So they can’t time schedule, they can’t
budget, and they run out of gas on the highway. I had a psychiatrist
that had this problem. She was always double booking people because
she just had no sense of how long things took, which irritated a lot of
her clients. So we worked on that area and she now can do that.
And then I work with a lot of adults and see what I call a cognitive
mismatch. This is where parts of somebody’s brain isn’t compatible
with the demands of the job that they are involved in. I had a pilot
that had the auditory memory problem and his strategy was whenever he
was flying into busy airspace was to ask the air traffic controller to
repeat the instructions over and over again because he couldn’t
remember them. And my fear was what if that air traffic controller is
really, really busy and can only say those instructions once and he
couldn’t remember them? So my joke was I used to ask him if I was ever
getting on a plane to file his flight plan with me so I wasn’t flying
in the same air space as he was. But the better solution was that we
addressed the problem and now he can just hold the information. He can
hear it and hold it.
I had a pathologist, he was doing his residency in pathology at a
teaching hospital in the United States and had that object recognition
piece in the right hemisphere and he didn’t realize that he had the
difficulty. He was examining breast tissue and it was somebody that
had had cancer and they were seeing whether she was in remission, she
had had chemotherapy and radiation and he knew how important this
determination was so he was really careful and really diligent. And he
was just about to sign of that the person was in remission when his
supervisor came over and said, “Didn’t you se these cells up here?
This is cancer”. So some of the things we think are human error could
be this cognitive mismatch. He realized this was really serious and
significant. He exited his residency, addressed this problem and he
won’t make that kind of mistake.
I had a butcher who had that kinesthetic problem and imagine if you
don’t know where this hand is and you have got a really sharp knife in
this hand it’s really not a good career choice. So the first day he
came into my school his left hand was all in bandages, so obviously we
addressed that problem and he doesn’t make that difficulty. I had
someone on the Olympic ski jump team in Canada who had this very, very
mild problem here, but for him a mild problem was really significant
because you are coming out those shoots at whatever they are going and
he would just make a slight imperceptions, or slightly misread where
that part of his body was in space and he would tend to fall to that
side.
So I am just going to kind of go through, sort of quickly, like we know
that for neuroplastic change, I think I talked about this briefly,
there are certain things that have to be. I mean, I whish it was a
quick fix; I wish it was really easy, but it isn’t. The brain doesn’t
change all that easily, not in a sustained way. So any activity we do
that’s really going to change the brain requires real active sustained
engagement, lots of repetition. And neuroscience is talking about this
thing called effortful processing, which is again where you have to
calibrate the difficulty of the activity so it’s really a mental
workout for the brain. And one of the ways you can do that is this
novelty and task complexity, like with the clocks. I did everything I
could with two hands, I added a third hand, and then a fourth hand and
now we have ten hands. It’s to increase the complexity to make that
brain process.
And, as I said at the beginning of the talk, what’s really exciting to
me is there is plasticity over our life span. I have worked across the
whole age span and I have seen the 81 year old make the same progress
as the 15 year old. And there is lots of research going on now looking
at variability in plasticity which is really interesting. I mean I
have practically seen students that come in that have very similar
profiles, same age, same gender, do the same amount of work and they
both make progress, but one moves four times more quickly than another
one. And it just makes sense, there are individual differences in
everything, so why wouldn’t there be individual differences in
plasticity? So there is a lot of research now, a lot of it’s coming
out of Sweden, looking at some of the factors that make somebody have
more neural plasticity or less neural plasticity. And as we understand
this more we can use it to enhance these kinds of programs.
And just again repeating what I said, but again we know that every time
we do something with our brain it changes it, but the kind of change we
are talking about here is really profound change that takes incredible
amount of effort, work and energy to change it, but then those changes
are there for life. And what can we do to sustain these changes? I
mean we can keep our brain active over our lifetime. In our own lives
we can try to be less sleep deprived. I mean, meditation, reduce
stress and anxiety, increase effortful processing, active engagement
and we have all heard that Hebb’s principle “neurons that fire together
wire together” that make those parts of the brain function more
effectively.
And why is it important? It’s important because it allows the brain to
function optimally and to learn and kind of navigate through our world.
And people often ask, like what is my vision for education? Really, I
mean having struggled with learning disabilities myself and knowing the
anguish that caused, at some level I believe this is alleviating human
suffering. And I work with lots of adults and what they tell me all
the time is that at a certain point in their life the stopped dreaming.
They did not dare to dream. I mean the doors just started closing and
their life got more and more constricted and they feel in a lot of
cases their career was chosen for them because there were so few doors
open that they could only walk through those doors.
And I think what this work allows people to do is not only dream, but
actually competently realize their dream, because they have the
cognitive capacity to navigate through the world and learn and it opens
up more doors and more possibilities for these individuals to walk
through. And my kind of reason for being in life is really to make
this work more accessible to individuals that are having learning
challenges to make it available in schools. This is teacher training
in August in 2013 in Toronto. There are teachers here from Australia,
New Zealand, the United States, actually there might be some of the
teachers here in the audience here today are in this picture and
Canada.
And I am committed to training more teachers to really we have got
probably millions of data points of all of these children’s progress
from 1978 when I started this work up until now. And to really mine
this data so that we can enhance the delivery and the effectiveness of
the program so that children have a different trajectory through
education and that they can actually experience learning as joyful, and
easy, and pleasurable and that is my true vision for education. So I
thank you and I am happy to answer any questions.
[clapping]
Yes?
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Yeah, I have worked with individuals with
Aspergers, which is the high functioning autism and they are those
whole non-verbal pieces and auditory processing, reasoning. We have
had success, the progress through the program is a bit slower, partly
because a lot of those students it’s harder for them to maintain
engagement. Not because they get distracted externally, but internally
by the processes going on within them. Students who are more severe on
the autistic spectrum we don’t really understand what’s going on in the
brain. From my work to work it’s a very targeted cognitive stimulation
to very specific parts of the brain. So if I don’t understand what I
am targeting I can’t create a program or an exercise for that.
>>: Your work in neural plasticity, how do you feel about the people
who talk about the neurological reorganization for the developmental
movement? I recently suffered some brain damage and had somebody who
has told me that I needed to do that, which is the --.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Oh, the crawling?
>>: Yes.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Yes, I mean I believe there are multiple
windows into different cognitive functions. And what I have discovered
is a series of windows into different cognitive functions. It doesn’t
mean that other people haven’t come up with ways that can stimulate
function. And I guess it would be --. My comment would be to look at
what they are asking you to do and think, “Does that match where you
are having difficulty?” And if you feel it doesn’t then it’s probably
unlikely that it’s going to be of benefit.
>>: [indiscernible].
>>: I have a quick question. You mentioned in your childhood that you
were not eager to try new things and it was difficult conceptually to
reach out to something because you had held onto it and what are the
strategies that you would recommend? Like if you are trying to get
children to do something new? Because my son he just want to do his
usual things and he loves his routine and I am trying him to get
something else?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: If there is a real cognitive difficulty
there the best approach is to address the cognitive difficulty. To
find a program, if there is a school, schools here that can deliver
this program to actually stimulate function so then you don’t have to
use a strategy. He actually can do things differently, he can compare
and contrast and do all of that. If that’s not an option it’s kind of
look at the task and see how you can break it down to very, very simple
steps and do it gradually, because if it’s too overwhelming --.
Like for me everything was overwhelming and that created anxiety. I
used to talk about I lived in “amygdala hell”, which was just terror
and fear all the time and when you are in that state you can’t learn,
but maybe if somebody had understood and just made it really simple,
like kind of one tiny little step and helped me understand rather than
the whole overwhelming [indiscernible] of everything that would be my
best recommendation if you can’t access the program.
>>: Are there profiles of individual with learning disabilities that
you have seen that your program can’t help? And if so is that
something you can identify up front? So that’s my first question; and
my second question, are there options here locally for parents?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Okay, so I can answer both of those. My
program is very broad because it’s addressing 19 different cognitive
functions. And what I say to parents or educators is go on the website
or look in my book, I describe all of the areas that we work with and
if you see a match to your child or a child in your class to those
profiles then this program will be appropriate. It’s so broad and it
covers the very common areas that are related to learning difficulties
that in most cases it’s going to address those problems.
And in terms of schools that are here there is a school in Bothell,
Gate, no Heritage, Heritage Christian Academy, I am doing a talk there
tonight and it offers the program and then there is Gateway and
Crosspoint that’s in Poulsbo and Bremerton. So those are the schools
outside of the Seattle area that currently offer the program. On my
web site there is a little button called participating schools, you can
go in there and it will show the schools around the world that offer
the program.
>>: You mentioned that these challenges you experienced were also
existing in your mother and in your brother. They often seem to run in
families. Last time I checked your website you did not have anything
for home implementation, but when you get into a family, you are
talking, to go to a private school, you know 17,000 dollars a year, you
multiply that times several children, you are talking a house mortgage.
Is there any plan to get it implemented on a home schooling basis or
some other way it can be implemented on students that cannot attend
private school?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Yeah, my commitment is to make is
accessible and is looking at how is this possible. So one is obviously
private schools, but then there is private school tuition, one is
getting publically funded schools interested and we are in a public
school in Toronto, in [indiscernible] which doesn’t really help you
much, one in Sydney in Australia, but that’s my commitment. It just
takes time, a publically funded school is a larger bureaucracy. And
long-term to see if there are ways that I can deliver this remotely.
I mean currently the model that we have had a lot of success with and
works really well is a school get’s interested; we create a
relationship with the school, because we need certain requirements met.
We need the school to agree to give me or give the program four
cognitive periods, for 40 minute periods a day. So it means we are
really taking half of the students’ day to do cognitive exercises.
Less than that is not going to benefit the student and I will not do
anything that won’t benefit the student.
So it really works well in a school based program, because we are
taking half of the day of that child and then the school will send
teachers to be trained and then we have an ongoing support delivery
model, ongoing professional development with the school. But I am
always looking at how can I maintain the integrity of the program and
deliver it more broadly and make it more accessible? That’s always
what drives me.
>>: So do you find that people are moving to Toronto to have access to
that one public school system in the North American continent?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: People within the Toronto region are
trying to move, but because it’s only one school system and we are in 4
schools and that’s 40 students, which is tiny, they are taking pretty
much students out of their school system.
>>: They thought that they were going to have a trial school here, but
it got nixed at the last minute and some of us are in contact with
people in Oregon trying to support that and figure out how to join
that, because that sure is the goal, to be able to deliver it. I mean,
publically it would be ideal.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Yeah, that’s a charter school. They are
voting tonight in Portland, they are voting tonight to see whether it’s
going into a charter school and there wouldn’t be tuition.
>>: You mentioned working with adults --.
>>: I am sorry I have just one more question.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Okay.
>>: You mentioned working with adults.
What are the options?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: With adults, I mean some adults come into
the full day program. Schools that have run the program after two
years of sort of successfully running the program they can offer a
part-time program. So adults --. And that depends on whether the
school wants to do that. And a lot of schools offer part-time program,
I mean Aarowsmith in Vancouver, I think Gateway I think is looking at
in February starting a part-time program and that would be after hours.
But, usually what we can do is work on one cognitive function at a
time, because we need four hours per week to affect change. But we
have had a lot of success with adults. So it would be if you are
interested I would go on the web site and contact, Gateway, I think
they said they were starting in February.
Okay, I think that’s that?
Yeah, just one.
>>: So you hear of all these new web sites coming open, brain training
and stuff. Do they have any credibility based on your research? Like
lumonicity.com and learning directs? I mean there are so many out
there now it can confuse us. Do they have any credibility?
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: It is confusing. I mean Lumonicity comes
out of I think good neuroscience, Posit science, which is Michael
Merzenich out of UCSF. It is good science, but they are doing general
stimulation. It’s going to have limited benefit for an individual
struggling with learning difficulties because it’s not targeted
stimulation to the area that they are having difficulty with. I would
say they are more, for us, as we are getting older, just to keep our
brain sharp. Just good, general stimulation, but they aren’t designed
or targeted for individuals struggling with learning problems.
>>: So how do we get diagnosed? Is that something that’s part of the
program? Is that the first step that you take? [indiscernible]
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Yeah, some people come in with having
psychological reports, you know, having a report from a psychologist.
Other individuals just go on the web site and they say this, this and
this. We are working on an online questioner that hopefully should be
available in a month that people would be able to go on the web site,
answer the detailed questions on a continuum and it would say, “Well it
looks like your child has this profile” and that would suggest that
they would benefit. Because it’s expensive to go to a psychologist and
get your child assessed. Ideally if you don’t need to do that and you
can say, “Yes, this is a match according to the areas” then you don’t
need to have a separate assessment.
>>: Great, thank you very much.
>> Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Thank you.
[clapping]