April 17, 2001 reorganize itself structurally. All these findings show an area of the pre-frontal cortex that normally con- In young children, the auditory memory prob- the brain has more capacity to recover from deficits verts sequential symbolic processes into sequential lem manifests itself as forgetting instructions to do than once thought. motor actions. things, especially things not related by meaning, The Heart Of Learning Disabilities The second line of research was the work Such people can do simple movements, but such as things they might need to do to help their of Russian physician and neuropsychologist Dr. when longer, sequential motor activity is called for, parents, or what the teacher said their homework is. It’s been thought deficits in the brain cannot be reduced, only compensated for. Alexander Luria who, analysing Russian soldiers they get overloaded. Thus, they can often type or Parents and teachers have to repeat instructions But a Toronto educator aims to prove that’s not the case. wounded in the Second World War, mapped the print neatly enough, because each letter is pro- over and over, and think the child isn’t listening, or Part one of a two-part series brain in the 1940s without the benefit of brain scans duced by a few movements at a time. Since each has ADHD, but the problem is more focal. Parents By Norman Doidge by precisely correlating location of wound with loss printed or typed letter is made in the same way often think their child is stubborn, irresponsible new system of understanding and treating comes to (fill in the blanks).” This new system helps of function. He was also able to analyse complex ac- (except for capitals) long sequences are not re- or lazy. If the child is told to do something and learning disorders, pioneered by Barbara explain these difficulties with great economy. tivities such as reading, or the use of logic, grammar quired. But cursive writing connects all the letters then gets distracted, the instruction will be totally A Arrowsmith Young, a Toronto educator, is Young, who founded and directs the Arrowsmith and writing, into their constituent parts. in a slightly different way, and requires a complex forgotten. showing remarkable results. School in Toronto, developed the treatment by put- Arrowsmith Young took Dr. Luria’s work and sequence of movements, overloading the memory If the average person can remember seven The system is of particular interest to doctors ting two lines of research together. applied it to learning disorders. She realized many capacity of the prefrontal cortex. Hence, writing is unrelated things they hear (as in a typical phone because it is based on strengthening weak brain The first is the discovery of neuroplasticity. Even patients with learning disorders had deficits in the jerky. number), such people might be able to remember areas, and derives from familiar territory: studies of up through the 1980s, medical schools taught that same areas Dr. Luria’s patients did. Reading is slowed because it also involves inte- only two or three. They often feel embarrassed patients with strokes and brain lesions. It provides the brain cannot recover from deficits or regenerate Treatment for learning disorders before the grating symbolic sequences with motor movements about asking others to repeat things over and over, hope for significant improvement for those with itself. discovery of neuroplasticity was generally based on of the eyes. The reader’s eyes must track across the and develop strategies to deal with it in later life learning disabilities who have problems with read- But in a study published in American the premise deficits cannot be strengthened, only page at the right speed and take in precisely the (such as compulsive note-taking, Post-its, writing ing, memory, putting thoughts into words, compre- Psychologist in 1966, Prof. Mark Rosenzweig of the worked around or compensated for. Those with right-size visual gulps of words. People with weak on the hand). In severe cases, they can’t follow the hension, logic, mathematics, learning languages, University of California at Berkeley, described an trouble listening and taking notes were encouraged motor symbol sequencing often misread words story in a song lyric. With effort, they can keep up organizational difficulties, clumsiness, impulsivity, experiment in which he placed rats in both stimu- to tape lectures or hire “note-takers.” Those with because their eyes skip in a jerky way. with others for a while, but then get exhausted. attention, speaking smoothly, trouble writing neatly lating and cognitively impoverished environments. trouble learning foreign languages were encouraged Finally, speech involves converting symbolic They tune out easily in lectures or classes. While or reading emotions in others. He found those who had been in the stimulating to drop them. sequences into motor sequences. These people something like methyl-phenidate hydrochlorid e Learning disorders are one of the most underes- environments had heavier brains, with better blood Arrowsmith Young developed exercises for the sometimes find their thoughts come faster than will improve their performance, it is not getting at timated causes of failure in both school and life. A supply and greater quantities of neurotransmitters. 19 areas that lead to the most common learning dif- they can convert them into speech. Often they the root cause: a focal difficulty of a particular kind person can be intelligent but still have a focal learn- It was one of the first substantiations of the idea the ficulties. These exercises are the opposite of com- can’t find the right word, so they ramble and talk of memory. ing problem that has a major impact on their life. brain could change its structure with stimulation. pensations; they tax the weakened area. Recently, around the point. Frequently they leave out im- Using various memory exercises, these children Many depressed adolescents have undetected learn- This year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine went to American groups have begun using similar tech- portant information they thought but couldn’t put can improve, and some who came to the school on ing disorders. Many of us chose a career not because Dr. Eric Kandel (PhD), who showed that as snails niques. Thus the Fast ForWord program taxes two quickly enough into words. Treatment involves drugs for ADHD can go off them, as the underlying we wanted it, but because we had limited options learned, the branches between their neurons were areas, probably those related to-to use Arrowsmith sophisticated, high-speed tracing techniques, which learning disorder is treated. owing to an area of cognitive difficulty, which was physically altered and enhanced. Young’s way of understanding things-deficits in isolate the left hemisphere motor region area that A followup study at the Arrowsmith School undetected. Some who are stuck in psychotherapy Evidence for neuroplasticity has been coming Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area of the brain. controls eye movements. showed 80% of students achieved their educational actually have undetected learning disorders. fast and furious lately. Dr. Fred Gage of the Salk What follows are clinical descriptions of learning ■ Auditory memory for instructions: We once imag- goals. Though some entered the school as many as For those with several areas of dysfunction Institute discovered the brain has stem cells deep dysfunctions that underly learning disabilities. ined the brain had completely separate areas seven grade levels behind in reading, math and other (which is quite common), life options dwindle within it which seem related to the capacity for ■ Problems in motor symbol sequencing: Those with for perception, memory and reasoning, but that activities, they caught up to peers. rapidly, starting in elementary school. Those whose regeneration. messy handwriting, or who have to print when doesn’t appear to be the case. Some people have Norman Doidge is a Toronto research psychiatrist and psy- difficulties are mild may get through elementary Neuroscientists have also shown that after am- they write, or who read slowly or with difficulty, excellent visual memories and can scan a printed choanalyst. He is on faculty at Columbia University, Centre and high school, but in university, when the load is putation the area of the brain that mapped or rep- or who have laboured speech and trouble getting list of words and remember them well, but have for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and head of long- increased, suddenly begin to bomb out for reasons resented the lost limb gets taken over to be used to to the point, or who omit important information, awful auditory memories. The memory systems term psychotherapy in the department of psychiatry at the they can’t explain. “My mind is like a sieve, when it map adjacent areas of the body. Thus the brain can often have a problem here. The deficits stem from for these perceptual systems are different. University of Toronto..