Top Researcher in Brain Plasticity Discusses APD and Reading Disorders

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

APD and Reading DisordersThe day a child is born is the day when the child’s brain starts creating a processing center for all the intellectual stimulation that he will encounter.

Children who can’t read end up having their language processor created defectively, says neuroscientist Michael Merzenich. For example, there’s a noise problem. Noise is interfering with the processing of language, and this often leads to APD and reading disorders.

There are many different factors that can create a noisy background for the language processor. This was determined when kids were born with cleft palates and doctors proclaimed they would be mentally retarded for the rest of their life. Years ago, most of the children with cleft palate couldn’t read.

However, kids with cleft palate these days aren’t doomed to a life where they can’t read. Their cleft palate is fixed surgically, and in that surgery the auditory tubes in the middle ears are opened up. The closed auditory tubes muffled the sound so the kids couldn’t hear the sounds being spoken to them. That’s why they couldn’t learn language. They heard muffled English. As a result, there were memory and cognitive deficits in the child with cleft palate, too.

But after the surgery, the child can learn to read.

When the scientists tested the child’s ability to hear a sound, they found it took 11 times longer for the child to hear it. Amazing, isn’t it, but not surprising. The sound just didn’t make sense to them when they had all that background noise in their brain. And their brain processing center created abnormal neurons and synapses.

But what Merzench says is that you can train the brain out of this bad habit in about 30 hours. And according to what he said at the TED conference, 450,000 kids have proved it, increasing speech production, fluency, reading ability, memory and cognition.

APD is nothing more than a noisy brain that needs a little training.

And that’s why Gemm Learning APD programs work so well. Find out why.

 

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The Brain Activity Map Project and Learning Difficulties

May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Brain Activity MapIf you have a child in kindergarten to third grade with a reading disorder, auditory processing disorder, dyslexia, or other learning difficulties, President Obama’s new project to map out the genes of the human brain won’t help him or her.

That’s because the project will take at least 10 years and will cost a minimum of $3 billion. Your child will be in high school by then, and if his or her reading skills don’t improve in the meantime, your child is headed for a life of poverty, according to studies.

Obama’s Brain Activity Map Project is now in the beginning stages and includes top scientists from the following institutions:

• Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Chemistry Department at the University of California in Berkeley

• The Kavili Foundation in Oxnard, CA

• The Kavili Institute for Brain and Mind, UCSD, La Jolla, CA

• Kavili Nanoscience Institute and Departments of Physics, Applied Physics and Bioengineering at California Institute of Polytech, Pasadena, CA

• Kavili Institute for Brain Science, Columbia University, New York, NY

• Department of Genetics and Wyss Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

In the summary of the project details, the scientists report that their goal is to reconstruct the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits and better understand both fundamental and pathological brain processes.

Searching for genetic influence and nanotechnology answers on dyslexia, auditory processing disorders, dementia, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorder is the goal of this project.

Right now scientists often view the millions of synaptic connections in the brain as impenetrable jungles where researchers get lost. They attach electrodes to the brain and test only a few neurons in a small area of the brain. But when the brain contains millions of neurons, the rate of discovery of information about the brain would take light years to accomplish.

Neurons connect to thousands of other neurons in circuits inside a matrix. They don’t act as individual neurons. And the fact that the neurons exhibit a characteristic called plasticity, which means they can change rapidly due to stressors placed on them, makes it difficult if not impossible to make new discoveries at anything other than a snail’s pace.

With the aid of statistics, thermodynamics, and quantum physics,  a method called emergent analysis has created explosive bursts in information related to other topics including superconductivity, quantum Hall effects and coherence, magnetism and superfluidity. This type of analysis has already proven itself in the areas of sequencing of genomes, and now it will be applied to the study and mapping of the human brain.

Some of the questions that the researchers will be answering include what happens when the brain develops and then reorganizes itself after an injury, how drugs alter behavior and the local/global effects, what memories are transferred from one area of the brain to another over time, and how the brain can overcome learning difficulties and disorders. They expect that new diagnostic tests will be developed for brain diseases and new devices and strategies will be developed for brain stimulation to overcome diseased circuits as well as new facts and therapies for autism.

Every dollar invested into the project is expected to return $140 back to the economy with new industries and commercial opportunities. The scientists are hopeful that another result is a new generation of scientists that can teach students more effectively. Find out more of how this study could affect children with learning difficulties in our next post.

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Why Most 8th Graders Lack Proficiency in Reading

May 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

8th Grade Students Lack Proficiency in ReadingThe statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the year 2009 are, frankly, quite frightening. When you look at what percentage of students lack proficiency in reading, you’ll be shocked. Here are some of those results:

 

 

Northeast states      Only 35.4% of 8th graders are proficient in reading.

Midwestern states   Only 34.2% are proficient.

Western states        29.3% are proficient.

Southern states      26.4% are proficient.

 

The state with the highest proficiency level was Massachusetts, where 43% of the 8th graders made the grade in reading. Some of the lowest performing states were Alabama, West Virginia, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi and the District of Columbia. And there are still regional pockets where reading scores are even worse. For example, in Detroit, only 7% of the 8th graders are proficient.

These scores haven’t improved much in two decades. The experts report that if a low percentage of students reach the minimum standards, it could be due to the choice of poor teachers or possibly less money.

But maybe there’s more to this picture than blaming the teachers and not having enough money. The truth is that the entire school system is failing.

What we already know about reading is that it requires processing skills in several areas of the brain. Reading requires language skills. You have to hear the sounds of the words to read fluently. When you read silently, you still hear the words inside your head. But if you don’t know the difference between the sounds, your comprehension of the material is low. What you think you’re reading is totally different from what’s really on the pages.

Reading requires a certain amount of working memory power within the brain. Interestingly, memory exercises are frowned on in schools. Somewhere along the way, school boards decided to do away with making children memorize a lot of information. And with this decision came the  decline in building up that part of the brain.

We’re left with children who can’t read. They have poor skills in writing. And their math scores are just as poor. Those three Rs – reading, writing and ‘rithmetic are the solid foundation that all other learning springs from.

It’s currently thought that a child who isn’t proficient in reading by 3rd grade may not ever catch up, and is doomed to dropping out of school or low income jobs for the rest of his or her life. Don’t put your child anywhere near this outcome.

The best gift you can give your child in this day and age is not that new shiny bicycle, that new computer, or the latest computer game. Instead, it’s skills in reading. Do whatever you can to make his scores proficient or above proficiency in reading. The way to get started is with our Fast ForWard™ program. You’ll never look back.

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What Dyslexia is Not

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

What Dyslexia is NotWhenever a child has difficulty in school, this is one of the first things that crosses a parent’s mind: is there something wrong with my child’s intelligence? Is there a medical problem?

With dyslexia, it’s common for parents to think both these thoughts. That’s why it’s important to understand the misconception about dyslexia and intelligence.

 

Dyslexia Has Nothing to Do With Intelligence

Dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence or IQ. Your child could be the next Einstein and have dyslexia, or he could be gifted in other types of intelligence, such as kinesthetic, and become the next all-star athlete. Similarly, your child could have a very high IQ or an average IQ and still have dyslexia.

Many children with dyslexia learn to adapt their thinking over several years just to cope with the disorder, and this coping process may bring out more creativity than with other children. But the bottom line is that learning to cope with dyslexia on your own is far different than using programs such as Fast ForWard™ software, which decreases the coping time that’s needed by every dyslexic person.

 

Dyslexia is a Language Problem

When a child has dyslexia, the problem is a linguistic one, not one with the eyes where corrective glasses or surgery is needed. Reading is a language skill that depends on listening and reading, and dyslexia can result whenever listening or reading skills are delayed.

For example, your child’s listening skills depend on his ability to hear the different sounds of words. If he mistakes the word “fan” for “van,” his brain interprets a very different meaning of what you are saying. He may not be able to hear the difference in these words or break down the words into sounds. This affects his reading.

Because dyslexia is not a medical problem, taking prescription medications for it won’t improve your child’s cognitive skills. This is why medical insurance doesn’t cover treatment for dyslexia.

If you’re ready to take the next step to help treat your child’s dyslexia, get more information about Fast ForWard™ software provided by Gemm Learning.

Filed Under: Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With: ,

Celebrate Dyslexia or Seek Dyslexia Treatment?

May 2, 2013 by

Celebrate Dyslexia or Seek Dyslexia Treatment?There is a positive side of dyslexia. To overcome the day-to-day challenges that a dyslexic has, other areas of the brain start to become more active.

For example, a child begins to get more creative at solving problems. If you pose a problem to him, he’ll most likely think outside the box to answer the problem. This results because he has to use out-of-the-box thinking for reading and other daily activities he participates in. He’s unable to read like other children so he has to invent a way around his reading disorder in order to succeed in life.

To think outside the box, he may ask adults to show him the concept in a hands-on way. When he works out the concept with his hands, this activates another part of his brain so that the learning of the concept is made real to him.

One of the other brain centers that is activated by having dyslexia is intuition. If he can intuit the answers to questions asked in class, he can have better success academically.

Thinking outside the box, learning kinesthetically and developing the ability to use intuition at an early age are great achievements by the teen years. In some ways, the acceleration of these skills sets up a child for business success while other children will take years to develop similar skillsets. For example, read our interview with Henry Winkler to see how dyslexia affected this famous actor and author.

However, there’s a downside to all this positive thinking about dyslexia. The downside is that it still takes a child with dyslexia years to develop the “gifts” of dyslexia. And in the meantime, what’s happening is a string of repeated failures. Failures in the classroom on a daily basis. Failures at home with parents and siblings. Failures socially in the real world, too. And you can’t control how your child is going to interpret those failures.

How long will it take your child to take it to heart that he’s not reading as well as other children in the class? How long will it be before he decides that he’s not as smart as the other children? How can you expect your child to stay positive about these “gifts” of dyslexia when frankly he doesn’t have them yet, and he sees himself as lacking normal skills other children have?

How long will it be before he feels shame for not being up to par? And how many years will he carry that shame in life?

All these are the true realities of a child with dyslexia during these early formative years.

The only solution is to boost cognitive functions with dyslexia treatment that specifically addresses the causes of dyslexia. And when you do, the coping mechanisms are accelerated and within weeks, your child notices his brain is really capable of developing all the skills that other children have developed. It’s the most remarkable transformation you’ll ever see.

Find out how your child could benefit from dyslexia treatment.

Filed Under: Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With:

Why You Should Act Early to Get Dyslexia Help

April 30, 2013 by

Act Early to Get Dyslexia HelpHave you ever watched the movie Nell? It’s a Jodie Foster movie where she stars as a child who has been left in the wild to grow up. When people find her, she has no language skills. Of course, because of the concept of neuroplasticity, her brain continued to adapt to her environment and she learned many skills such as how to survive. She doesn’t have language skills, reading skills or socialization skills.

In a way, you could compare Nell to a modern civilization child with dyslexia. The child doesn’t have the language skills to hear the different sounds of words. The child can’t read but he or she does have a great sense of who he is and what he will or won’t do. He solves problems in his own way – and often you can’t predict how he’ll solve the next problem. Or he doesn’t solve them at all. And his socialization skills aren’t the highest because he’s always on guard of his feelings around others.

The longer children are left on their own to struggle with dyslexia, the more likely they have a hard time fitting well in society – like Nell. Every dyslexic child has the feeling that they aren’t smart like other children. Without dyslexia help, they feel shame about their skills in reading and academically even though they can’t do anything about them on their own.

And the longer the brain is unable to perform simple skills, the worse the situation gets. All learning in school is dependent on skills learned in a sequential manner.

Imagine the repeated sense of failure, day after day. How long can a child be expected to put up with those failures before he cops a bitter attitude about people? How much should we expect him to have the strength of character to brush off other children – some of them his best friends – who are teasing him and making fun of his inability to read?

The internet and real life is full of children who grow up and tell their real life tales of woe about having dyslexia. It’s no wonder that their memory of putting in exceptional amounts of time into studying as a child is one that prevents them from deciding to pursue a college degree.

Their difficulties from childhood follow them into the workplace when their inability to read instructions repeats the same scenarios from workers who tease them or call them ‘dumb’. But this time they may not put up with the name calling. They may pick a fight or cop an attitude of bitterness and resentment.

These are examples of how the mind psychologically deals with this constant failure and embarrassment – about something that was easily remedied at an early age. Of course, back when these adults were children, the methods were not available, but they are available now.

The fact is that the sooner we can address these issues at their root cause, the sooner your child can begin to see life as a wonderful place of opportunities. Your child really doesn’t need to be a modern-day Nell.

Find out how to get dyslexia help from Gemm Learning.

Filed Under: Reading and Dyslexia Tagged With:

If Language Processing Skills Falter, Get Help for Children with CAPD

April 25, 2013 by

Central Auditory Processing DisorderA child could have good grades in all his subjects until the time comes to take a second language. Then if he fails, it could be a clue that he has CAPD, or central auditory processing disorder.

Other symptoms of this disorder include poor hearing when there is background noise, trouble learning, reading and spelling. Children with CAPD usually do great in math and science, but anything with multi-step directions can be unusually difficult.

Language courses are a problem because children with CAPD don’t hear the difference between long and short vowels. Vowels are usually heard at about 60 decibels, while the ambient noise in the classroom is around 59 decibels. Thus, the sound coming from the teacher’s mouth is masked by the sounds in the classroom. The child can’t hear them.

Of course, in most cases, the teacher doesn’t realize that this is what is happening. She assumes the child is not listening and may chastise him for that. But he is listening. He just can’t hear her.

Some children with CAPD hear the sounds but the problem lies in interpreting what they mean. Their brains scramble the sounds and essentially make what they heard sound like gibberish. In these children, the same problem exists – the brain doesn’t communicate well with the ear.

The brain does have coping mechanisms for this. A CAPD child will learn a word based on all the letters together in the word, rather than break it down into smaller parts that can be sounded out. The problem is that once he progresses to higher grades, the words become too difficult to do this. Their reading ability starts to level off.

Now suddenly you have a child who’s going nowhere. It’s time to intervene. Certainly if you find out your child had CAPD before this time, it’s  best to intervene as soon as possible. There are compensatory strategies that your child can learn. For example, by strengthening memory, problem solving, and attention skills, the overall effect of CAPD is minimized.

We think in English, so any glitches in our processing of English will slow down our thinking process. If you’re thinking slower, then it’s difficult to connect ideas together. It’s easy to end up making decisions based on incorrect conclusions. Reasoning ability starts to fail.

The CAPD stifles development because of its effect on language processing. This is why it’s so important to find a solution as early as possible.

Take a look at this list of central auditory processing disorder symptoms to find out if your child has CAPD.

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The Bottom Line on Learning Styles is to Improve Auditory Processing

April 19, 2013 by

Learning StylesYou may never have given any thought to learning styles until recently if your child was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder or APD.

If so, you learned that everyone learns difficult new information in one of three ways – auditory by hearing, visual by seeing, and kinesthetic by participating in an activity.

Information on learning styles became popular when Rita and Kenneth Dunn discovered that when students focused on learning information the way their brain preferred to learn it, and the learning style presented by the teacher matched the students’ learning style, their grades improved after only six weeks.

Rita Dunn is a Professor in Administration and Instructional Leadership at St. John’s University in New York. The learning styles concept is utilized worldwide now, as Dunn started her research in 1980 and has had plenty of time to refine the concept and also back the idea with research studies.

However, most schools still haven’t adopted the learning styles method – and that means that if your child is a visual or tactile learner (needs hands-on activity to learn), then he or she is in trouble once setting foot into the classroom.

What Makes the Most Sense about the Learning Styles Concept

Let’s think about the learning style concept in a different way, considering which came first – auditory learning, visual learning or kinesthetic learning. Is there a relationship between the three?

Before a child can read, how is he processing information? How is he learning language? It’s really through hearing. The auditory system wins and is used predominantly. He hears his parents make sounds and speak words, and he associates those words with what is happening. He doesn’t know how to read or even identify the alphabet. He can’t touch a word and he can’t touch most of the things his parents are discussing. The whole process of learning is primarily dependent on auditory processing early in life.

If a child has difficulty with auditory processing, he’s at a distinct disadvantage. The teacher will deliver new knowledge to learn by lecturing and class discussions. If the child has an auditory processing disorder, he can’t hear the differences between sounds in words spoken in class. His brain doesn’t recognize and interpret sounds the way other children without the disorder do.

Even if there is no background noise in the classroom, the auditory processing that occurs between the ears and the brain could still be inadequate. That means your child can’t follow directions because he can’t hear them. He can’t follow conversations and understand what is being said. Auditory processing disorder affects about 5% of all children.

A child’s brain will try to cope with the deficit by switching learning styles to visual or kinesthetic. It’s entirely possible that a child who has a learning style of visual or tactile is a child that had to make the switch in his brain to cope. He was struggling to process language due to faulty auditory processing.

Thus, the answer is to go after the direct cause of the problem. Change the auditory processing by improving it so the deficit is corrected and then watch your child blossom.

Learn more about the relationship between auditory processing disorder and learning.

Filed Under: Learning Issues Tagged With: ,

Students with APD Struggle to Learn a Second Language

April 17, 2013 by

Students With APD Struggle to Learn a Second LanguageYou’ve heard the claims made by many people  – both parents and education specialists: if your child learns a second language at school, he’ll have an advantage over other students in years to come.

It’s easier for them to learn a second language as a child because their brain is growing faster and it’s more flexible when they are children than when they are older or are adults. This idea was based on research from the 1960s.

The time that a child should learn a second language is debatable. Researchers Stern, Burstall & Harley in 1975 followed 17,000 British schoolchildren learning French and discovered that older children are better at learning a second language than younger ones. In the 1980s, Genesee found that children learning a second language in grades 7 or 8 had scores on language proficiency equal to those who started learning in kindergarten or grade one.

Several studies have found that younger children pick up on native accents in a language better than older children. Pronouncing words depends on not only the ability to hear them but also the ability to speak them correctly.

And that’s the point here – that students with APD, or auditory processing disorder, can’t hear the sounds of the words in the new language. In fact, they aren’t hearing the sounds of the words in the first language either.

How much can a young brain with and without APD handle at one time? If the child has auditory processing disorder, then all the good intentions in the world won’t help the child learn the new language. It would be setting the child up for failure.

Languages have different sound patterns that have to be learned by the brain. Thus new sounds from another language could alter how English sounds are heard and spoken. Learning a first language is like learning to put on and tie your shoes; learning a second language is learning how to become a marathon runner. If you don’t have your shoes on right, you can’t run the marathon.

Does your child have APD? If so, think twice about the idea of having him or her learn a second language. Let’s focus on getting the shoes to fit.

Build English language proficiency with the auditory processing disorder treatment at Gemm Learning.

Filed Under: Learning Issues, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

What Happens When Children Lack Reading Fluency

April 10, 2013 by

Reading FluencyHow much children comprehend a chapter in a book depends on something called reading fluency. This is the ability to read effortlessly and with feeling.

Now think about this for a minute: your child is reading out loud with lots of stops and starts. He looks to you every time he can’t pronounce a word and you intervene. When he comes across a new word, he asks for a definition. How fast do you think he’s reading? Do you think his speed is fast enough for him to truly comprehend what he is reading?

How good would your comprehension be if you had to stop continually in the middle of a sentence? You would have to re-read a passage a few times, right?

The same thing is true with children.

Here are some alarming statistics:
•  44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child.
• 44% of American 4th grade students cannot read fluently.
• 15% of all 4th graders read no faster than 74 words per minute. At this pace, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of ideas within the sentence and across the page. People speak at 100-175 words per minute. They can listen at a faster rate, up to 800 words per minute. At 74 words per minute, they’re putting themselves to sleep.

Reading fluency is everything.

When your child can hear himself reading a book at a faster rate, he can better connect the ideas in the sentence together. He can relate the ideas of the paragraphs together better as well.

The human mind can comprehend fast talkers easier than slow talkers; think of how quickly your brain adapts to an auctioneer and how you automatically start talking faster after an auction. When you listen to a slow talker, it’s too easy to forget what they said in their last sentence. Effective communication needs two people to hear the words at a rate fast enough to encode it; it’s the same thing with reading.

Reading fluency is everything.

Yet something odd is happening in America. In 4th grade, about 56% of students can read fluently but 8th graders aren’t doing too well. They haven’t mastered fluency and now their homework load is drastically increased. They must read several chapters per subject and turn in homework questions. How will they ever get through it all? Do they even get through it all?

It’s no wonder why they start to lose interest in reading. The act of reading has become an endless cycle of failure. They can’t read a paragraph without knowing what all the words mean. If they stop to look up the word, they can’t go on reading at the point where they left off. They have to re-read the passage.

Their self-talk might be something like this: “I think I’ll start my homework. History again. (starts reading) Inauguration? What does that mean? Maybe I better look it up. Wait, didn’t Mrs. Toth tell us today? I can’t remember what she said. (Looks it up.) Why can’t I remember it? Everyone else remembers things. Oh, so that’s what it is – the event when the new President gets sworn in. Okay, now I get it. I must be dumb, I couldn’t remember it. Back to the chapter. I guess I’ll have to start over… I bet Jessica doesn’t have to start over when she does her homework… Secede from the nation? What does that mean? I’ll have to look it up… Another word I didn’t remember… Cold War? What war was that?”

As much as some education experts believe that memorization is not important, there are things in life that have to be learned that provide the foundation for additional knowledge to be gained. Learning how to associate two seemingly unrelated things together is a cognitive skill that must be mastered.

In reading there are basic cognitive skills that have to be learned before a child can go on to the next level. And if they aren’t being addressed in school, the child isn’t getting those skills anywhere else. He won’t even get them from tutoring because tutoring focuses on a subject and not the cognitive skills.

It’s no wonder that the child doesn’t like history – or any other subject. The self-talk he uses is potentially self-degrading AND he’s missing some basic facts that help him read.
Childhood is the time that’s supposed to be filled with amazement, wonder and joy for everything in life. Feeling inadequate doesn’t fit into the picture. Or it shouldn’t.

No child can read fast until reading accuracy and fluency are mastered. That’s the bottom line.

If your student is a struggling reader, find a solution that enhances reading fluency. Discover the online reading programs offered at Gemm Learning.

Filed Under: Learning Issues Tagged With: ,
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