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 of nerve cells carry information to and from different areas of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Scientists are trying to draw a complete atlas of these connections – sometimes referred to as the “connectome” – to gain a better understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease.”

…

“Another surprise was that when growing dendrites go searching for potential partners, they reach out to axon boutons that had previously connected with other dendrites – “as if they were attracted to a restaurant that already has a line at the door, rather than trying a brand new one,” says Cline.”

These observations reinforce the work that Frank Belgau describes in Chapter 26 of his book A LIFE IN BALANCE. The Learning Breakthrough Program is based on Belgau’s model about the entrainment potential of synaptic responses (trainability). His design of a variable difficulty balance challenge combined with repetitive perceptual motor skills activities gives us a real world training tool to effect neuroplasticity changes.

For detailed technical information refer to Dynamic Formation of Functional Networks by Synchronization.

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 magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to get a cross-section map of their brain.

Half the volunteers then underwent a six-week training period to learn how to juggle, during which they were also encouraged to practice for 30 minutes a day.

At the end, they were all able to perform at least two cycles of the classic three-ball “cascade.” They were then scanned again, as were their 24 non-juggling counterparts.

Among the juggling group, imaging showed important changes in white matter, the bundle of long nerve fibres that carry electrical signals between nerve cells and connect different areas of the brain. So-called grey matter consists of areas of nerve cells where the brain processes information.

The findings, published online on Sunday by Nature Neuroscience, are important, for they suggest the brain remains “plastic” – or mobile and adaptable – beyond childhood.

via How juggling rewires your brain | COSMOS magazine.

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 unproved, says David Rabiner, a researcher at Duke University who writes a newsletter about treatments for ADHD…

A team at The Ohio State University has nearly completed a pilot study of neurofeedback for ADHD that was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

The team had hoped to announce results last week at a scientific meeting in New York, but Gene Arnold, one of the scientists in charge of the study, says they had to delay that announcement because “we weren’t able to get the results analyzed in time,” he says.

Learning Breakthrough and the vestibular-cerebellar training approach to ADHD remediation more generally have been considered by the research team at Ohio State University as well. Our interest in the topic stems from the substantial neurofeedback aspect to the Learning Breakthrough Program…as the repetitive nature of LBP’s balance exercises themselves generate what the user in this article calls “constant feedback during a session” through constant motor control monitoring, planning, executive function modulation, and hemispheric integration all in one system. There is much hope that as this research progresses and the pilot study information is collated that LBP will be tested along side on neurofeedback techniques and a control group.

Auditory processing disorder in relation to developmental disorders of language, communication and attention: a review and critique – International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders.

This article describes the vagaries of diagnosis of auditory processing issues and shows how important work is being done to help make proper evaluations and treatment research widely available. It is not definitive but is a useful article for those orienting themselves to CAPD issues.

Background: Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) does not feature in mainstream diagnostic classifications such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV), but is frequently diagnosed in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and is becoming more frequently diagnosed in the United Kingdom.

Aims: To familiarize readers with current controversies surrounding APD, with an emphasis on how APD might be conceptualized in relation to language and reading problems, attentional problems and autistic spectrum disorders.
Methods & Procedures: Different conceptual and diagnostic approaches adopted by audiologists and psychologists can lead to a confusing picture whereby the child who is regarded as having a specific learning disability by one group of experts may be given an APD diagnosis by another. While this could be indicative of co-morbidity, there are concerns that different professional groups are using different labels for the same symptoms.
Conclusions & Implications: APD, as currently diagnosed, is not a coherent category, but that rather than abandoning the construct, we need to develop improved methods for assessment and diagnosis, with a focus on interdisciplinary evaluation.

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

Here’s another great example of neuroplasticity impacts derived from motor skills training. Cortical expressions of proprioceptive responses over time are around us every day and form the basis of the EXPERIENTIAL part of neuroplastic changes. The implications for athletic performance and rehab are tremendous and the article below gives some good insight.

Motor Learning and Neuroplasticity in Rehabiliation.

Here’s a brief summary of an excellent paper by Boudreau et al from Manual Therapy. Patrick Ward and I had a brief discussion about this paper and since we found great benefit in its contents, I thought I would share some of it with you.

The purpose of this paper was to summarize several important aspects of motor-skill training for enhancing musculoskeletal rehabilitation.

Cortical Neuroplasticity: a dynamic feature of life that encompasses functional or morphological change in properties of neurons (connection strength, represenational patterns, neuron reorganization.

• Positive changes: improvements in motor performance
• Negative changes: decreases in performance, such as in the presence of chronic pain (low back pain resulting in decreased cortical spinal drive in lumbar musculature and subsequent shift in somatosensory representation)

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”.

Seminar: Dr. Frank Belgau on Neural Connections and Learning Breakthrough

This video shows Dr. Frank Belgau relating the connection between neural network efficiency and resolution of neurons being mathematically connected to the number of neurons involved in the difficulty of a task. This concept is at the core of Learning Breakthrough’s “variable difficulty balance platform” which Dr. Belgau credits as his most important single contribution to the world of learning treatments. It is the main reason that Learning Breakthrough has succeeded where other treatments have not. Don’t get confused that the exercises of imitators is what makes a program like this work. Its the balance challenge, delivered over time and in a precise manner that generates the sought after neuroplasticity gains.