Barbara Arrowsmith-Young - The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: And Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation

Praise for The Woman Who Changed Her Brain

Arrowsmith-Youngs poignant and uplifting book about her transformation from a child born with severe learning disabilities to a dynamic pioneer in cognitive education offers hope to anyone who has ever struggled with a learning disorder, brain trauma, ADD, or stroke. By her own fierce determination and passionate desire to learn, this remarkable woman changed her own brain and has since helped countless others to change theirs. This is an important book.

Mira Bartk, New York Times bestselling author
of The Memory Palace

This is a poignant book about two people who connected across continents and generationsa Canadian woman with an unusual cognitive makeup and the great Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, whose writings gave Barbara Arrowsmith the tools to change her own life and the lives of her many students. Moving, insightful, and empowering!

Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D., author of
The Wisdom Paradox and The New Executive Brain

If you have a son, a daughter, a parent, a spouse, or a brain, this is a must-read book. It will open your mind to new possibilities on how to deal with traffic jams in the brain.

Alvaro Fernandez, CEO and cofounder, SharpBrains.com

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born with severe learning disabilities that caused teachers to label her slow, stubbornor worse. As a child, she read and wrote everything backward, struggled to process concepts in language, continually got lost, and was physically uncoordinated. She could make no sense of an analogue clock. But by relying on her formidable memory and iron will, she made her way to graduate school, where she chanced upon research that inspired her to invent cognitive exercises to fix her own brain. The Woman Who Changed Her Brain interweaves her personal tale with riveting case histories from her more than thirty years of working with both children and adults.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience have conclusively demonstrated that, by engaging in certain mental tasks or activities, we actually change the structure of our brainsfrom the cells themselves to the connections between cells. The capability of nerve cells to change is known as neuroplasticity, and Arrowsmith-Young has been putting it into practice for decades. With great inventiveness, after combining two lines of research, Barbara developed unusual cognitive calisthenics that radically increased the functioning of her weakened brain areas to normal and, in some areas, even above-normal levels. She drew on her intellectual strengths to determine what types of drills were required to target the specific nature of her learning problems, and she managed to conquer her cognitive deficits. Starting in the late 1970s, she has continued to expand and refine these exercises, which have benefited thousands of individuals. Barbara founded Arrowsmith School in Toronto in 1980 and then the Arrowsmith Program to train teachers and to implement this highly effective methodology in schools all over North America. Her work is revealed as one of the first examples of neuroplasticitys extensive and practical application. The idea that self-improvement can happen in the brain has now caught fire.

The Woman Who Changed Her Brain powerfully and poignantly illustrates how the lives of children and adults struggling with learning disorders can be dramatically transformed. This remarkable book by a brilliant pathbreaker deepens our understanding of how the brain works and of the brains profound impact on how we participate in the world. Our brains shape us, but this book offers clear and hopeful evidence of the corollary: we can shape our brains.

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young is the director of Arrowsmith School and Arrowsmith Program. She holds both a B.A.Sc. in Child Studies from the University of Guelph and an M.A. in School Psychology from the University of Toronto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education).

Visit the author at
www.barbaraarrowsmithyoung.com

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Copyright 2012 by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young Foreword 2012 by Norman Doidge, M.D.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arrowsmith-Young, Barbara
The woman who changed her brain: and other inspiring stories of pioneering brain
transformation / Barbara Arrowsmith-Young.
p. cm.
1. Arrowsmith-Young, Barbara. 2. NeuroplasticityPopular works.
3. Learning disabledUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
QP360.5.A77 2012 362.3092dc23
[B]
2011051961

ISBN 978-1-4516-0793-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-0795-6 (ebook)

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 Goodmanfor 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.