Fast ForWord Media Coverage

Fast ForWord was launched in 1997 and has since served 2+ million students, mainly in the United States. It has faced intense scrutiny, mainly from the founders’ neuroscientist peers, but also from a wide range of educators who conducted trials to test its effectiveness in schools.
Fast ForWord research studies

Media Coverage

Fast ForWord has appeared in countless newspaper and magazine articles, as well as radio and TV coverage. Here’s a sampling of some Fast ForWord reviews in the media:

Time Magazine

Time magazine reviewed Fast ForWord, describing is as “a powerful video-game program to aid children who cannot process the sounds of language fast enough to comprehend normal speech,” and “a promising application of recent and remarkable discoveries about the power of the brain to learn new tricks.”

Newsweek writes, “Fast ForWord does something quite a bit more revolutionary than your run-of-the-mill educational software: it rewires brains.”

PBS Television Documentary

Fast ForWord was the subject of a PBS special called “Brain Fitness For Kids.” This program explores the exciting promise of brain plasticity and how parents can use this to optimize learning and dramatically, positively, and permanently impact the lives of children of all abilities. Through interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, educators, parents, and the children themselves, it tells the groundbreaking and moving story of previously unthinkable successes in learning and life.

For many years, conventional wisdom in science and education held that most of the brain’s functioning was established during the “critical period” of the first few years of life. It was thought that after these first years, the brain was hardwired by the child’s neurological history, genetics, and life experiences.

Following this way of thinking, a teacher worked within ‘limits’ rather than exploring the possibilities of a child’s ability to learn, and has doomed generations of children to a limited learning experience and an often deflated sense of self-worth.

The Brain That Changes Itself – by Dr. Norman Doidge

This NY Times bestseller explores practical applications of neuroplasticity, including a chapter on Fast ForWord. Here’s an introduction to the book:

The brain is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. Arguably the most important breakthrough in neuroscience since scientists first sketched out the brain’s basic anatomy, this revolutionary discovery, called neuroplasticity, promises to overthrow the centuries-old notion that the brain is fixed and unchanging.

The brain is not, as was thought, like a machine or “hardwired” like a computer. Neuroplasticity not only gives hope to those with learning or other mental limitations, but expands our understanding of the healthy brain and the resilience of human nature.
Request excerpt from book on Fast ForWord

Reviews of the Book

“Fascinating. Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
— Oliver Sacks

“The discovery that our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains – even into old age – is the most important breakthrough in neuroscience in four centuries.

In this revolutionary look at the brain, bestselling author, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., introduces both the brilliant scientists championing this new science of neuroplasticity and the astonishing progress of the people whose lives they have transformed. Introducing principles we can all use as well as a riveting collection of case histories – stroke patients cured, a woman with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, learning and emotional disorders overcome, IQs raised, and aging brains rejuvenated – The Brain That Changes Itself has “implications for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history”

— The New York Times.

“Readers will want to read entire sections aloud and pass the book on to someone who can benefit from it…Links scientific experimentation with personal triumph in a way that inspires awe.”
— The Washington Post