The Breakthrough Blog

A January article in the online Journal, Behavioral Medicine Report and a study published in the Journal “Nueron” describe new understandings about the synaptic connections that underlie what we commonly call “neuroplasticity.” In an informative article, Study Shows Map of Brain Connectivity Changes During Development, Christophey Fisher, PhD, points to two important issues: “Connected highways [...]

How juggling rewires your brain | COSMOS magazine. PARIS: Neuroscientists have discovered that learning to juggle causes changes in white matter, the nerve strands which help different parts of the brain communicate with each other. University of Oxford researchers recruited 48 healthy young adults who were unable to juggle and put them in a functional [...]

Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Brain reorganization takes place by mechanisms such as “axonal sprouting” [...]

Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) don’t dwell on why things go wrong in our lives. We are too busy moving on to the next shiny thing. ADD/ADHD medication helps us slow down our racing thoughts, so we can ask, “Is this the best thing for me to be doing?” or “Is this the [...]

It’s always good to see celebrities using their fame to help people. Learning Breakthrough salutes British star Kara Tointon for going public about her Dyslexia. Kara Tointon’s BBC Documentary, “Kara Tointon: Don’t Call Me Stupid” will help people overcome the stigmatization and seek treatments that can and do help adults with dyslexia.

Train The Brain: Using Neurofeedback To Treat ADHD : NPR. The link above references an interesting piece on NPR about how neurofeedback can be used to treat ADD/ADHD: Even though there are studies now showing that neurofeedback works for ADHD, all of these studies have serious limitations, researchers say. So the approach remains promising but [...]

When the cognitive paradigm became dominant, inattention became the focus of ADHD, and disorder was renamed attention deficit disorder (ADD). Two subtypes would later appear in the literature, which correspond to ADD with or without hyperactivity. The diagnostic nomenclature reflects the notion that the primary problem was an attentional (and thus, cognitive) one and not primarily behavioral. The attentional problems had to do with the ability to shift attention from one stimulus to another (something that Jonah Lehrer has called an attention-allocation disorder, since it isn’t really a deficit of attention). The hyperactivity symptoms were also reformulated as cognitive: connected with an executive processing deficit termed “freedom from distractibility.”

Preliminary findings from a study of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show that sensory intervention — for example, deep pressure and strenuous exercise — can significantly improve problem behaviors such as restlessness, impulsivity and hyperactivity. Of the children receiving occupational therapy, 95 percent improved. This is the first study of this size on [...]

So much of my reading lately and connections to new users have to do with the misdiagnosis of ADHD. There seems to be no other “disability” that generates more difficulty in accurate diagnosis and more ways to address the symptoms than ADHD. For a rather good look at the topic, a doctor friend sent me the link attached here. The language may be a little loose but the point is that there are many paths to a misdiagnosis and it is something for all of us, therapists, teachers and parents to be aware of that I thought it would be a good share.

via The Role of Brain Fitness in Self Help Programs: All of those programs involve regular practice of certain behaviors, and there are three behaviors we humans can hope to manage or control, our thinking, our feelings, and our behaviors, or how our body moves. If you have read Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s book FLOW, which is treatise [...]