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.

From the BBC.UK site:

Actress and Strictly Come Dancing contestant Kara Tointon has battled with dyslexia all her life and longs to be able to read a book from cover to cover.

You can see how Kara tries to overcome the condition in Kara Tointon: Don’t Call Me Stupid on Thursday 11 November at 2100 GMT on BBC Three. The programme will also be available on the BBC iPlayer.

via BBC News – Kara Tointon’s struggle with dyslexia.

 

Our clients are frequently telling us that overcoming the stigma is one of the hardest things about seeking treatment for dyslexia.  This documentary will help thousands of people by shedding light on the dyslexia challenge.

Misdiagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – WrongDiagnosis.com.

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 on the psychology of optimal performance, then you know that we process sound, visual, touch, smell, and taste information at the rate of seven bits of data every 1/18th second, so self help programs need to be learned and implemented in a very short period of time. (1/18th second is twice as fast as I can blink my eyes).

Self help then must be a process of awareness and management of sensory processing done very quickly and very frequently.

I liken the process for my anger management clients to steering a car, you make thousands of small adjustments to the position of the vehicle on the road, and are paying attention to hundreds of variables at a given moment, traffic in front, behind, traffic lights, children, the policeman six blocks ahead, ect. As you do this, you keep the vehicle going in the direction you want, at the speed you want, in a safe way for yourself and other drivers. You avoid potholes.

Page 74-75 The Still-Missing Core

“One of the basic principles of a two-engine airplane is the synchronicity between the two engine systems that are fixed on either side of the plane. If one engine puts out more thrust than the other, it causes problems in flight. If the disparity is sufficiently severe, it can cause the plane to go out of control and crash. Remembering this principle caused an idea to begin to percolate: was the issue these children were experiencing related to the balance between the two sides of their bodies?

In the mid-1960s, It was not a popular idea to look for learning ability in the body, but the more I observed the children in my classroom, the more the two problems seemed corollary. And why shouldn’t they be? The movement of the body through space is defined by brain functions, just as the ability to read and do arithmetic are defined by brain functions. If the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, wouldn’t it make sense that the various departments in the brain are connected, too? I began to wonder: what if an individual’s body provides a graphic representation of the inner workings of the brain?”

Dr. Frank Belgau-author of A Life in Balance, Discovery of a Learning Breakthrough

via Facebook 2 | Excerpt from Life in Balance, Discovery of a Learning Breakthrough

Dr. Edward (Ned) Hallowell, ADHD expert and best-selling author, announces making the Learning Breakthrough Program available at the prestigious Hallowell Centers in both Massachusetts and New York.

Dr. Hallowell’s inclusion of Learning Breakthrough’s proven balance and sensory remediation program is a welcome addition to the therapy options offered at his US centers. Learning Breakthrough will be critical to his positive, multidisciplinary, “strength-based” treatment aproach and is being used to help solve the challenges of ADHD, Dyslexia, CAPD as well as other cognitive needs. The program’s value lies in enabling clients to further their developmental and academic objectives as well as social, behavioral and self-esteem ones, which is exactly why it has been so valuable as a complementary treatment in similar clinics for decades.

Use It or Lose It: The Theory and Practice of Brain Exercise and Fitness for Cognitive Health – 1252th Edition | Health Blog.

When we exercise our brains, we put our Neurons and connections between neurons in action.

Given the diversity of functions outlined above, it is clear that different activities are going to activate different brain areas, which scientists now know thanks to neuroimaging techniques. There is no one magic bullet that is best (either crosswords puzzles, or computer-based programs, or physical exercise): we do need a variety of mental stimulation or “brain exercises”.

The article Brain scans shed light on dyslexia, written By Health Day Reporter Amanda Gardner, sheds light on dyslexia causes with modern brain scanning technologies. The findings, published in the online issue of Current Biology, seem to be in line with previous research. The experiment laid the foundation for the neuro-anatomy of dyslexia versus the non-impaired reader.

Guinevere Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University said, “A typical person has an augmented response in this part of the brain, and in dyslexics, they’re not seeing that augmentation, suggesting that there does not seem to be a system in place to show that there’s an association [between visual and sound] that’s going on.” Further work on vestibular remediation correlates remarkably well with the sensory model being described. The more sensory coordination that occurs in any reader, the more resolved the system of abstract language construction becomes. This is the heart of LBP’s design logic and why we found the article to be so relevant.

If you’re the parent of a child who’s having trouble learning or behaving in school, you quickly find yourself confronted with a series of difficult choices.

You can do nothing — and watch your child flounder while teachers register their disapproval. Or you can get help, which generally means, first, an expensive and time-consuming evaluation, then more visits with more specialists, intensive tutoring, therapies, perhaps, or, as is often the case with attention issues, drugs.

For many parents — particularly the sorts of parents who are skeptical of mainstream medicine and of the intentions of what one mother once described to me as “the learning-disability industrial complex” — this experience is an exercise in frustration and alienation.

The rest of the article describes some areas of similarity with LBP because of the program’s substantial amount of vision-related activities. The balance and vestibular issues so critical to LBP are not described, but the hurdles that parents face and the ways that treatments are presented to parents, the pressures, etc. will be very strongly identified with by those who have had to walk that road.

Read the complete article on the Times website >>

Dyslexia in children and adults is often addressed according to two models, each of which generally focus on linguistic or language-related skills. “These methods emphasize strategy and cognitive development and are not based on a brain processing relationship, which is dysfunctional in dyslexia. Consequently, these techniques have not produced consistent reading improvement.” (Goldstein, 2001) Goldstein’s assessments still ring true today. Even so, many dyslexia treatment options tout an emphasis on “teaching” those with dyslexia words in a clearer way as if other reading educational efforts have somehow failed. The problem is, of course, that dyslexia is not necessarily a letter recognition problem, it is instead a cognitive processing problem. This means that dyslexia treatments based on language skills alone often fail.

One of the most common misconceptions about reading skills and acquisition of reading ability is that reading involves only a simple recognition of letters and subsequent knowledge of how to phonologically string those letters together into words. According to this simplistic model of reading, someone with dyslexia is simply not “seeing” the letters correctly, thus there is a perceived deficit in vision or sight. Although visual cues often play a role in the formation of dyslexia treatments, sight alone is only the tip of a very large iceberg. After all, when we see a sequence of letters, it has no meaning as an object until our brain, working as an integrated network of sensory systems, assigns significance to the abstract grouping of letters. Visual processing disorders, which are NOT related to the ability to see clearly, involve difficulties understanding visual information such as movement, spatial relationships, form, or direction. Such visual processing challenges, together with Central Auditory Processing problems, are frequently found in combination and result in a formal dyslexia diagnosis or poor academic performance.

However, the process is far more complicated on a cognitive level–mere recognition of words and sounds is only the first part in a long series of events that occur quickly and unconsciously in those without dyslexia but this process is “sidetracked” as the two hemispheres of the brain react differently than they would in non-dyslexic readers. Therefore, one of the fundamental flaws of traditional dyslexia treatment is that there is a heavy focus on teaching the words themselves while overlooking the fact that the problem lies in brain’s processing of letters as opposed to some kind of simple lack of understanding of letters, words and phonology.

A great deal of contemporary research focuses on the issue of brain processing in dyslexia treatment with multiple studies examining the delay or miscommunication between the left and right hemisphere of the brain, or problems with specific areas of the brain, including “planum temporal symmetry or angular gyrus dysfunction, that result in reading impairments and do not suggest developmental hemispheric changes as a rationale for dyslexia” (Goldstein 2001). While the results of these imaging-based studies continue to change our view of the cognitive and brain processing end of dyslexia treatment, one thing is clear—simply focusing on “teaching” those with dyslexia the letters or word sounds in a more focused way is simply inadequate. If the basic brain processes that govern the abstract meaning behind words and letters are not improved, then all of the phonics and letter training in the world will likely not solve the challenges that dyslexic readers face.

Source

Goldstein, B., & Obrzut, J. (2001). Neuropsychological Treatment of Dyslexia in the Classroom Setting. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34(3), 276.

To those who have not spent time pouring over the wealth of academic studies discussing the relationship between balance and dyslexia (as well as a host of other reading and learning difficulties), it might seem strange to suggest that balance and dyslexia bear any relation. However, when we realize that balance is governed by the vestibular system—a vast network that spans across other neural and body systems—it begins to make sense that a lack of balance and calibration of the delicate but immense processes governing cognitive acts (like reading or writing) can be upset when the balance and sensory systems themselves are not performing properly.

Before getting into more details about the physiological relationship between balance and dyslexia, let’s put the issue into a simpler context via the “cake” analogy. Hypothetically, we are setting about to make a four-layer cake, which is not an easy task as it involves several elements that must be just right in order to make the whole thing come together and remain upright. The temperature of the over must be exact and even minor alterations in the amount of sugar, flour, or eggs can make the cake as hard as rock or too soft to be layered. Cognitive processes such as reading, which seem simple when you look on the surface and see the end result, require the fine-tuning of the process of making a cake. If there is one “misfiring” during the process, you’ll be left with something that is unusable; however if all elements are synched and balanced together accurately, the end result is smooth and flawless.

One of the reasons why learning disabilities like dyslexia are not uncommon is because the relationship between balance and sensory processing within the vestibular system is very complicated. The vestibular system, which is critical to balance (which in turn governs far more cognitive processes) relies on neural transmission and processes between many systems in the brain and the body. There are “interconnections with the inner-ear, superior temporal cortex, insula and the temporal-parietal junction within the cortex, and the postural and extraocular muscle systems, all of which contribute to balance and vestibular reflexes” (Solan, 2007).  In other words, with so many neural “shots” being fired in such a vast array, there is great opportunity for problems to occur—for shot to go haywire.

One expert on the vestibular system has remarked that, “each element of learning occurs as a function of the individual’s total developmental framework….Learning in the absence of suitable developmental structures may preclude assimilation” (Solan, 2007). In other words, without proper functioning of the entire system of networks that govern neural and other processes, learning cannot occur in full. Our potential is not reached due to inefficient neural processing that results in barriers that can be targeted for improvement. At some point, the gaps in this framework will manifest and the information processing event will be stunted. This is absolutely the case with dyslexia and other reading difficulties. Without suitable interaction between the vestibular system (balance) and the brain, learning and applying reading or writing skills can be nearly impossible for some people. It is only when this imbalance has been negotiated, when calibration occurs, that the framework can be made effective once more.

The expression, “our bodies are remarkably resilient” extends beyond our physical capacity to heal and recover. This can also apply to our cognitive processes and body systems. Like other major systems in the body, the vestibular system is also resilient and can be adapted to enhance the quality of life. Scientific research has confirmed that practice reforming the balance system can have a positive impact on the underlying brain processes of those who with dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Source

Solan, H. A. (2007). Vestibular Function, Sensory Integration, and Balance Anomalies: A Brief Literature Review. Optometry & Vision Development, 38(1), 13-17.

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