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.

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.

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.

Interview: Dr. Frank Belgau on How is Neuro Feedback Involved in Learning Breakthrough.

Dr. Belgau describes how neurofeedback is powerfully integrated with Learning Breakthrough’s pendulum ball activities as the brain regulates itself in response to the successful and unsuccessful cycles of working with the pendulum ball. The body reacts through its multisensory balance system to adjust to expected performance conditions. When paired with a precision balance challenge device like the Belgau Balance Board, the activities form a neuroplasticity development tool with unique value to the sensory processing treatment world.

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.

Learning Breakthrough was developed to address foundational brain processing and strengthen the weak cognitive skills of students who are not meeting the demands of classroom work or adults that have struggled with learning challenges (or are involved in TBI or stroke rehabilitation) as well as those working to reduce the natural cognitive declines experienced as they age.  The recommended starting age for the program is six (6) years old and challenges such as Dyslexia and ADD/ADHD (attention deficit), Dyspraxia and Auditory Processing Disorder are among the range of classic diagnoses that therapists and physicians have used Learning Breakthrough to address for three decades.

Learning Breakthrough activities are physical, balance and sensory integration exercises that improve cognitive and literacy ability as well as motor skills and dexterity.  This integrated approach is used to strengthen underlying brain processing skills necessary for simple, efficient resolution of the following problems:

Reading difficulties
Poor or sloppy handwriting
Below average academic achievement
Inadequate verbal fluency
Inability to pay attention and stay focused
Poor memory and comprehension
Poor athletic performance
Difficulty following instructions
Low self esteem

Learning Breakthrough sessions are performed at home and become part of each client’s daily routine. Daily program use along with the precision of the equipment and movement exercises is what delivers benefits to each user.

Program attributes include:

Vestibular challenge and development – precise and individual adjustability enable calibration by all of the body’s sensory processing centers.
Sensory motor work – bean bags, eye-tracking exercises, pendulum ball routines, super ball tossback skills, fina and gross motor skills development and refinement and thorough sensory integration work sessions.
Grapho-motor – handwriting, drawing, writing, and fine motor “eye-hand” skills
Auditory training – analysis, segment work, blending with decoding and spelling issues, auditory reception difficulties, auditory expressive issues and lingual motor control integration.
Visual Processing skills – training and development through each activity segment.
Attention, focus, and concentration training—focus is on divided attention, sustained attention, and increasing frustration tolerance.
Memory training—call, recall, assessment, evaluation, validation and finally: calibration.
Neurofeedback and proprioceptive feedback – self-regulated motor control processes are refined through iterative work with specialized equipment referencing the common sensory input of gravity.
Logic and reasoning—skills improvement in seeing patterns and sequential processing challenges are developed in a critical sensory mapping model of the physical space in which our senses operate.

View the program’s neuroplasticity-enabling equipment along with a detailed description of each component’s design and attributes.