A quick overview

of the science

behind the

program

UNDERSTANDING BRAIN PLASTICITY

For years, the scientific community maintained that once our brains have formed they cannot be changed. Our brains were compared to machines. It was thought that after we reach a certain devel- opmental age, we have what we have and are stuck with it.

This is referred to as the brain being “hardwired”: like a computer. A computer will only have as much memory as you give it. If it runs out of memory, or if something stops working, it will not replenish itself.

Likewise, the scientific community believed for years that if a part of the brain doesn’t develop properly during those key formative years, or if it gets damaged (say, through a head injury or a stroke) it was irreparable. We were stuck with what we had. We now know that this is not true.

When we refer to a brain as being “plastic”, what that means is that it is actually malleable. It is NOT hardwired, and it has the ability to change constantly throughout our lives (for better or worse).

WHAT ARE NEURONS?

In order to understand how the brain is plastic, we first have to understand neurons and what they are.

A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical or chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialised connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral ganglia.

So in essence, one can think of neurons as wires in the brain that transmit information from one location to another.

Every time we learn something, a connection between neurons is made to pass along the information. The more we repeat that task, the stronger the connection becomes. Every time we FORGET something, a connection is broken.

Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist coined the phrase “Neurons that fire together, wire together” in 1949

UNDERSTANDING NEURALIGN

With a basic understanding of what brain plasticity is, we can begin to understand Neuralign. Neu- ralign is a program which uses brain plasticity to create connections that are responsible for proper reading and comprehension that might not exist in children with poor reading skills.

A couple of key terms that we need to understand before moving forward:

  • EXECUTIVE FUNCTION

    The executive function is like a neural management committee of cognitive processes, taking inputs from various areas. It decides when to direct attention to something and when to direct conscious “thinking power” to that something. The Executive function is responsible for directing concentration so that attention and “thinking power” are sustained.

  • WORKING MEMORY

    This has been described as ‘the white board of the mind’. This is the conscious part of the brain, where all learning takes place, and where all problems are solved. We use working memory every day. It is the ability to keep information in your mind for a short time. Studies show that a deficit in working memory often leads to difficulties in school.

  • COGNITION

    Cognition is the “thinking power” used in working memory.

  • COGNITIVE PATHWAYS

    These describe the pathways when Executive function, Working memory and Cognition are ALL employed. These are conscious pathways used for learning and problem solving, which require processing in working memory.

  • BEHAVIOURAL PATHWAYS

    When something is learned and mastered by the cognitive pathways, that something
    is shifted down into the sub-conscious as an automatized skill or piece of knowledge, which can be used when required. That is, the behavioural pathways supply automatized material to the cognition process, WITHOUT HAVING TO BE PROCESSED IN WORKING MEMORY. This frees working memory capacity, so that more difficult skills can be mastered. If students, for example, have automatized basic reading skills, this then frees their working memory capacity so that more difficult skills can be mastered, such as comprehension.

  • THE DUAL ROUTE TO READING

    Beginner readers use a different part of the brain to learn to read than skilled
    readers do when processing text. Beginner readers use the parieto temporal area of the brain to learn to read. When learning to read, students have to decode and identify each word individually, which causes them to read slowly, one-word-at-a-time. On the other hand, experienced readers use different neural pathways to read: the occipto temporal area of the brain. Skilled readers have automatized all the basic skills needed for reading, and can go directly from what their eyes see to meaning.

    This is the epicenter of the Neuralign philosophy. Those readers who get stuck at the parieto temporal stage, are stuck for neural reasons and will never be able to read fluently. Their working memories are permanently overloaded with lower order skills that they just can’t automatize. And thus, they can’t make the transition to becoming a skilled reader. Neuralign has been developed to help these readers create new neural pathways and transition to becoming skilled readers.

For brevity and convenience, Neuralign uses ‘Dyslexic’ to describe somebody who is ‘resistant to tutoring’, and who persistently fails to achieve reading fluency with good comprehension, with or without a diagnosis.

At left, typical readers activate neural systems that are mostly in the back of the left side of the brain; at right, dyslexic readers under activate these reading systems in the back of the brain and tend to over activate frontal areas.

Ref.: Sally Shaywitz M.D., “Overcoming Dyslexia”