Arrowsmith-Young - The woman who changed her brain: unlocking the extraordinary potential of the human mind

T wo people in addition to me were involved in the process of writing this book, and it would not be the book that it is without this collaboration. My heartfelt thanks to Annette Goodman and Lawrence Scanlan for each of the unique gifts you brought to the process.

Annette Goodman for your collaboration in writing this book, for your gifted writing, and for your ideas that helped make it better than I had hoped, for helping to conceptualize the chapters at the outset, for identifying the key elements in each story to support the concepts being developed, for your quest through discussion and writing to find a way to make the ideas understandable and accessible, for your gift of finding the perfect flow for the ideas, for seeing how the pieces of the puzzle needed to fit together, for writing so beautifully about your own experience with learning disabilities, which richly contributed to illustrating those cognitive functions, and for your passionate commitment to alleviate human suffering and give children the tools to be whomever they choose to be in the world without the burden of learning disabilities.

Lawrence Scanlan who rode the journey of this book, from the interviews of all the people who shared their stories, listening to and absorbing all of what they had to say for finding the poignant beauty in the stories and committing them to paper, for your honed writers craft and gift of finding just the right phrase or word to bring the material alive, for your ability to paint pictures with words that evoke the felt sense of the experience of having a learning disability, for unraveling the concepts in the science thereby making them intelligible, for showing me that sometimes less is more, and for your humor and patience throughout the process. Thank you for making the thoughts flow so eloquently onto the page.

T his publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering medical, health or other professional advice or services. If the reader requires such advice or services, a competent professional should be consulted. The strategies outlined in this book may not be suitable for every individual, and are not guaranteed or warranted to produce any particular results.

No warranty is made with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein, and both the author and the publisher specifically disclaim any responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book. Some names and identifying details of some of the individuals mentioned in this book have been changed.

F or 400 years clinicians were taught that the brain was like a machine with parts. An electronic version of this metaphor is still with us when we think of the brain as a computer and are told it is hardwired, as though its circuits are finalized in childhood. Most clinicians trained in the second half of the twentieth century were taught a version of this model. Some still are.

This hardwired-machine model of the brain had devastating consequences for children and adults with learning disorders. It gave rise to a fatalism about their condition, which meant that they were in all cases, necessarily, condemned to live with their disabilities because machines cant rewire themselves. At best, we could teach these children to find ways to work around their problems.

About thirty years ago, a number of major neuroscience experiments were conducted that overthrew this view of the unchanging brain. Often they went unnoticed; sometimes, when noticed, disbelieving scientists trapped in the earlier machine model assumed that these experiments were based on sloppy methods, or that the results applied only to animals, or if to humans, only to small parts of the human brain. These experiments showed that the brain is neuroplastic, meaning that it is changeable, and that mental experience, and mental exercise, could alter its very structure.

It took twenty years for mainstream neuroscience to begin to accept that these experiments were sound and applied to humans, and not only to part of the brain, but to all of the brain, all of the time. Today we can say these experiments have been replicated thousands of times. Research and clinical trials throughout the world have shown that neuroplastic approaches can be used to treat traumatic brain injury, stroke, obsessive-compulsive disorder, learning disorders, pain, aspects of schizophrenia, and other afflictions. Neuroplasticity is suddenly much spoken of, is a hot term, and many marketers are putting old wine into new bottles taking various simple brain games and rebranding them as neuroplasticity exercises.

When tackling brain processing problems, however, as with so much else, the devil is in the details. One must have an intimate understanding of the pace at which the brain changes, how to dose the exercises, and which brain function to target. The latter is important because a simple problem, e.g., a reading problem, can actually be caused by a weakness in any number of different brain areas, and only one of these need be weak for a person to have a reading problem. So, what is required is not just an all-purpose brain exercise (which does not exist) but a brain-based assessment of the persons difficulties. These assessments and exercises often require years of refinement. Realizing that neuroplasticity has huge implications for education, neuroscientists at labs all over the world are getting their feet wet developing this work.

One woman began applying neuroplastic principles first to herself and then to students, just after the first experiments were done thirty years ago. The future in neuroplasticity arrived in a one-room schoolhouse in Toronto about a third of a century ago when Barbara Arrowsmith-Young and the team at her lab school began applying neuroplastic principles to learning problems. Barbaras own story which I recounted in a chapter entitled Building Herself a Better Brain in my book The Brain That Changes Itself (2007) and which is movingly elaborated in this book, is truly heroic, on par with the achievements of Helen Keller.

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born burdened with a number of extremely serious learning disabilities, including a severe inability to understand logic and cause and effect or to understand events in real time. When she read about lab experiments that demonstrated plasticity in animals given cognitive exercises, she began to develop her own brain exercises. This was astounding for two reasons. First, because she was able, despite her learning problems, to persist, reading difficult articles multiple times until she could break through her mental fog and understand them. Second, because she was able to use what she learned to create mental exercises that worked and lifted that mental fog once and for all. Usually in science, those who make breakthroughs in treating brain injury are fiercely intelligent people with extraordinary brains, working with those who have severely compromised brains. Arrowsmith-Young played both roles. And because she had been so disabled, she went on to develop numerous exercises for her other learning disabilities. At the end of this process, she found she was sufficiently equipped to open a school that could treat many of the major learning disorders.