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.

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.

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 >>

Seminar descriptions of neurophysiology work of William Calvin and the multiplicity effect of neural entrainment.

This video shows seminar descriptions of the neurophysiology work of William Calvin and the multiplicity effect of neural entrainment. The more difficult a task, the more neurons are enrolled to perform it at higher and higher levels of efficiency. Calvin defined a mathematical relationship between the numbers of neurons operating in a system and resolution (speed of response) within that system.

How to adjust the distance between the Belgau Balance Board and the arc of the pendulum ball is a common question for those starting to use the program. The following answer to an email question from a new client should be helpful.

“The pendulum ball should swing out and back to ABOUT the belly button height on the user. This is not mandatory. You may find that it is more comfortable if the ball comes up a little higher. Whatever works best and gives the user the most precise and consistent feeling for tracking and hitting the ball is a good setting. The final setting varies of course from person to person so feel free to adjust the distance for comfort and ease of use.

My usual recommendation is to start with the board about 4 feet from the ball and adjust from there. The hanging height and swing pattern of the pendulum ball will have a lot to do with the distance that eventually gets decided on.

I hope this is helpful. What ever is comfortable and helpful and keeps the eye tracking, movement preparation and feedback feeling smooth is the place to end up.”

We are always happy to help out with more subtle details and any other questions that come up. Learning Breakthrough’s equipment is very specialized and things that we take for granted are not always so intuitive to new users. Keep up the daily work and let us know about other equipment set up questions that come up.