the woman who changed her brain - barbara arrowsmith young

[...]... educational system of the 1950s appeared to make up its mind about me early on In the primary grades in those days, students were grouped with others who read at the same pace I was put not with the “squirrels” (the quick readers), where I longed to be, and not the “rabbits” (the average readers) either, but with the “turtles” (the slow readers), who were mocked and teased by the other children To my... between “father’s brother” and “brother’s father” even when such language could be mapped onto concrete experience (my father did indeed have a brother) Both Zazetsky and I caught fragments of conversations, but we never grasped the whole The words came too quickly for us to decipher their meaning My habit had been to replay—as many as several dozen times—simple conversations, the lyrics of a song, the dialogue... EQUAL 4 TWENTY-ONE IN ONE EAR AND OUT THE OTHER TWENTY-TWO THE IMPACT OF LEARNING DISABILITIES TWENTY-THREE WORD SPREADS APPENDIX 1 Description of the Cognitive Deficits Addressed by the Arrowsmith Program APPENDIX 2 Lobes of the Brain APPENDIX 3 Brodmann Areas of the Brain Notes Further Reading Acknowledgments Index Photographs FOREWORD F or 400 years clinicians were taught that the brain was like... apparent Two brothers, Donald and Will, followed me, joining our older brothers, Alex and Greg Over the course of ten years, my mother, Mary Young, bore five children She was a teacher, a nutritionist, and a school trustee She and my father were founding members of the Unitarian Fellowship, and she helped design the curriculum for the church’s Sunday school My mother was a woman bent on saving the world—committee... In these cases, they must use brain exercises to build up new processing areas Another problem with compensations is that every time we choose to work around a brain area, we neglect it, further weakening what it can do I have used the terms learning disability and learning disorder, as does Arrowsmith- Young I am mindful that in some areas there is a well-meaning movement afoot to end the use of these... from the same nest and subjected one pair to intense training, the other pair to none He then conducted the same experiments with dogs: one pair got the enrichment of intense training, and the other pair got no stimulation When the animals were euthanized, Malacarne found that the brains of stimulated animals were larger than those of their counterparts, and especially in the cerebellum the part of the. .. Zazetsky and me, the primary problem lay in the left hemisphere at the intersection of three brain regions: the temporal (linked to sound and spoken language), the occipital (linked to sight), and the parietal (linked to kinesthetic sensations) This is the part of the brain necessary for connecting and relating information coming in both from the outside world and from other parts of the brain in order... on my desk The teacher had a responsible student take everyone else outside (where they gathered at the first-floor window and watched the drama unfold) My mother was called to the school This particular teacher was new to her profession and interpreted my confusing 6’s and 9’s and b’s and d’s as disobedience I once got the strap in front of the entire class, and as painful as this was, the humiliation... of The Brain That Changes Itself The Woman Who Changed Her Brain INTRODUCTION March 2, 1943, Vyazma, Western Russia On this sunny, almost warm but damp day, the soldiers are chilled, their army-issue felt boots soaked Lieutenant Lyova Zazetsky, just twenty-three years old, commands a platoon of flame-throwers—part of a contingent pushing back against the German invaders who are dug in atop the steep... into a coherent framework.” Zazetsky and I could not make meaningful connections between symbolic elements, such as ideas, mathematical concepts, or even simple words As he put it, “I knew what the words ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ meant but not the expression ‘mother’s daughter.’ The expressions ‘mother’s daughter’ and ‘daughter’s mother’ sounded just the same to me.” I too, could not grasp the difference . Marta Scythes 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 one of the first examples of neuroplasticity’s extensive and practical application. The idea that self-improvement can happen in the brain has now caught fire. The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. The Brain That Changes Itself The Woman Who Changed Her Brain INTRODUCTION March 2, 1943, Vyazma, Western Russia On this sunny, almost warm but damp day, the soldiers are chilled, their army-issue