This book is well worth the read as it describes multiple case
studies and tackles a wide range of learning deficits. Yet thirty
years of practical application still puts this body of empiricism in
the early days of both acceptance and general application.
Listen to what I mean here. It is obvious to tackle the clearly
learning deficient. It is not obvious to evaluate every individual
for learning deficits. What is clear here is that the brain
naturally favors what works best and empowers that against other
skills. Thus application of enhancement protocols are useful for
everyone including the so called smartest.
These enhancement protocols are not onerous so much as time
absorbing. They need to be worked at in the same way we work to
improve muscle tone and strength.
The work suggests that there are a fair number of target areas that
need to be attended to. As well the protocols are likely helpful for
those areas already strong. Thuys rthese methods need to come into
common usage.
The Woman Who
Changed Her Brain by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young: Review
Published on Saturday
May 26, 2012
Laura Eggertson
People with learning
disabilities have long been told they must learn to compensate for
their deficits, because they will never improve. In The Woman
Who Changed Her Brain, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young offers her own story,
and those of her students, to refute that conventional wisdom.
It's a fascinating
book that speaks to the lag between exciting developments in brain
science, and existing educational practices.
Arrowsmith-Young was
born in 1951 with serious learning disabilities. She could not
understand logic, cause and effect, or events in real time. She could
not tell time on a clock with hands. Basic math was a mystery. She
could not fully grasp what she heard or read. She was a
self-described klutz beause she wasn't aware of the left side of her
body. She describes her life as being “enveloped in a fog that
never cleared.”
Arrowsmith-Young's
phenomenal memory and determination got her through school. But she
felt alone — different; stupid, with few friends. At 14, she cut
her wrists with a razor blade, hoping to die. Then she woke up and
castigated herself for failing to get even that right.
At 25,
Arrowsmith-Young encountered, while in graduate school, the work of
Aleksandr Luria, a Russian doctor and psychologist who helped
brain-damaged soldiers overcome their dysfunction. She also read the
work of an American researcher who proved that rats' brains
physically changed in response to stimulation.
Based on this
research, Arrowsmith-Young created flash cards to simulate the
movement of a clock's hands. She spent hours on this and other
exercises, persisting until she rewired the parts of her brain that
had not been working.
Arrowsmith-Young's fog
lifted — for good, she says. She had stumbled across the
foundations of the science of neuroplasticity. That science refutes
the idea that the brain is fixed after a certain age. Essentially,
neuroplasticity is the concept that cognitive exercises and
experience can change the brain's very structures — forming new
neural pathways at any age.
As Arrowsmith-Young
describes, she has for more than 30 years harnessed the ongoing
discoveries in neuroplasticity to create an educational program to
address deficits in learning. She now runs the Arrowsmith School in
Toronto. She has created a program by which children, young people
and adults can change their own brains, by performing her repetitive
exercises.
Arrowsmith-Young
recounts the stories of about 30 children and adults who have
corrected learning disabilities by performing her cognitive
exercises, either at her school or other private schools in Canada or
the United States who use her program. It's an exciting and hopeful
book for anyone who has struggled with learning disorders, for their
family members or for the educators, social workers, psychologists
and physicians who have tried to help them and have witnessed the
toll these disabilities exact.
The book is also
frustrating, however. There are children struggling across Canada
with the same deficits that Arrowsmith-Young and all of her students
faced. But this science — and these programs, which have been
evaluated — are not available to them. According to the Arrowsmith
School website, the Toronto Catholic District School Board is the
only public board in Canada that has offered the Arrowsmith program,
at four schools. The board's continued use of the program has been
contentious — largely because of cost.
Dr. Norman Doidge is a
Toronto psychiatrist who has written about both Arrowsmith-Young and
neuroplasticity, first in a magazine article and then in The
Brain That Changes Itself (Penguin Books, 2007). He also wrote
the forward to The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. He's clearly
bothered that so few people know about Arrowsmith's methods, given
the need.
Unfortunately, access
is the issue — not just lack of knowledge. The majority of Canadian
families can't afford tuition at the private schools where the
Arrowsmith program is primarily offered. Until this knowledge and
these programs make it into mainstream public schools, children and
youth with learning disabilities will continue to be disadvantaged.
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