Posit Science Corporation
http://www.brainplasticity.com
225 Bush St, 7th Floor
San Francisco, California 94104
NOTES for the seminar provided by Dr. Doidge, June 4, 2008
(page numbers) are from the book:
The Brain That Changes Itself, 427 pages, 2007. $16/$19
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Paul Bach-y-Rita (1934-2006) first neuroplastician (p 1-26)
--- father had a stroke in NY; sons took to Mexico and rehabilitated him.
--- died 7 years later, autopsy showed 97% of brain dead.
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Tactile Vision Device (1968), (p 10-12, 18-24)
--- enabled blind-from-birth to "see" with skin and tongue areas.
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Cheryl Schiltz, vestibular malfunction following antibiotics.
--- "wobblers" feel like perpetually falling. (p 1-10)
--- gyroscopic helmet and tongue sensing device provided both
----- immediate and residual relief. --- Michael Merzenich
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Learning how to Learn.
--- When we learn we increase what we know.
--- We also change the structure of our brains.
--- We get defensive, or, curious to new info.
*** You have to be curious to change your Point of View.
*** Attention/Meditation releases neurochemicals against stress.
** Anything that produces disorientation and anxiety deter learning.
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Changing Brain Maps, (p 46-68, 225-239)
--- Wilder Penfield, Eric Kandel, David Hubel & Torsten Weisel.
--- Bil Jenkins and Michael Merzenich
--- Memories are in the brain, not "images".
--- Maps of normal brain regions change every few weeks, according to what the person is exposed to and responding and reacting to.
*** Maps became larger and more complex according to discernment of use.
*** Close attention was required for learning.
----- If learning is slow, slow the process to train neurons to associate faster, clearer, more efficient, applified.
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Sensory Substitution. (p 13-14, 19-26)
---
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Law of Association through Simultaneity, Freud, 1888, (p 223-4, 242)
--- When neurons fire at the same time, they become more strongly linked.
--- Freud was a neuroscientist who bacame a neurologist to make a living.
--- Plasticity is always possible where healthy tissue remains.
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Competitive Plasticity.
--- neural space is turned over to the skills we use most.
--- language requires large scale utilization of multiple abilities.
--- if new skills are cmpeting with current ones, expansion is limited.
--- harder to change a habit than to build a new one.
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Fast ForWard teaching, --- 2003 ---
--- 1 hour 40 minutes daily for 8 weeks.
--- 2 years of language development in 6 weeks.
--- visual and organizational skills improved.
--- Computer learning program gives rewards, triggers Dopamine.
*** Dopamine reinforeces the circuits connected with reward signals.
--- Dopamine = reward/plasticity/thrill seeking (consolidation). (p 88-116)
--- Orgasm triggers dopamine, sexuality can relate to history of experience.
*** Acetycholine helps the brain "tune in" & sharpens memories & perceptions.
--- Acetycholine = attention. (p 43, 71 86, 88)
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Brain Fitness Program. Posit Science (page 89)
1 hour per day, 5 x per week for 8-10 weeks = 20-30 yrs reversal.
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Barbara Arrowsmith Young, labelled retarded. (p )
--- read "The Man with a Shattered World", by Joshua Cohen.
--- prepositions are about "relationships" between symbols, time.
--- Cure through Clocks: isolated, sequential building of skills.
--- Devised 19 brain exercises. (p 37-44)
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The Arrowsmith School, (p 36-41)
--- http://www.arrowsmithschool.org/
--- first opened in Toronto, then other cities incl Vancouver.
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Eric Kandel, proved learning by simultaneity.
--- strong stimulation causes a protein kinase to turn on genes in the nucleus, and then the synthesis of proteins that change the shape of the synapse with more ...
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TMS Transcranial magnetic stimulation. (p 194-210)
--- Alvaro Pascual-Leone,
--- learning alters the motor-sensory maps.
--- Neurons have magnetic and electrical fields.
*** Imagined vs physical repetitions develop similar strengths of skill.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique for gently stimulating the brain. It utilizes a specialized electromagnet placed on the patient’s scalp that generates short magnetic pulses, roughly the strength of an MRI scanner’s magnetic field but much more focused. The magnetic pulses pass easily through the skull just like the MRI scanner fields do, but because they are short pulses and not a static field, they can stimulate the underlying cerebral cortex (brain). Low frequency (once per second) TMS has been shown to induce reductions in brain activation while stimulation at higher frequencies (> 5 pulses per second) has been shown to increase brain activation. It has also been shown that these changes can last for periods of time after stimulation is stopped. TMS was first developed in 1985, and has been studied significantly since 1995.
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Constraint Induced Movement Therapy, (p 132-162, 173,)
--- Edward Taub, Birmingham, ALA clinic. (p 147-9)
--- 10 years of controversy from political humanists.
--- Provides 5 days on, 2 off, 5 days = 12 days therapy.
--- largely for stroke victim recoveries, about $5,000 vs 30K
--- to avoid learning helplessness and physical dependency.
Edward Taub, PhD,
Department of Psychology,
University of Alabama at Birmingham,
1530 3rd Ave S, CPM 712, Birmingham, AL 35294-0018.
E-mail: etaub@uab.edu
Taub Therapy Clinic
http://www.taubtherapy.com/
Center for Psychiatric Medicine C-700
1713 6th Avenue South | Birmingham, Alabama 35233
P: 1-866-554-TAUB | F: (205) 975-9700
E: TaubClinic@uabmc.edu
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Dreams and Memory. (p 238-241)
--- Sleep allows us to consolidate learning & memory.
--- REM sleep is required for plastic development, necessary for neurons to grow; paticularly enhances our ability to retain emotional memories; allows hippocampus to turn short-term memories into longer-term ones.
Massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinks it so that new, long-term explicit memories cannot form. This trauma releases glucocorticoid stress hormone which kills cells in the hippocampus. This predisposes such an infant to life long illness. ... leads to supersensitization.
Depression and high stress are other factors which encourage glucocorticoid release and hippocampus cell loss. Antidepressant medications increase the number of stem cells that become new neurons in the hipocampus.
CAUTIONS:
1. Many reviewers extrapolate the findings of pioneers and scientists.
This abberation results in generalizations never found nor intended, nor realistic. This encourages the public and future trainees and students to assume that the reality is simpler than it is, and, to often assume static and mechanistic structures where dynamic living ones are present.
2. Scientific revolutions often take decades, or, generations, or longer.
Don't wait for new protocols and options to come to you.
Attitude: Bring what you want to you.
The Arrowsmith School can train teachers in 2 weeks.
Socialized medicine is often resistant to change, considered expansion, for it is seldom able to integrate, reduce, or elimiate older programs for Fear of competition from those involved with the older programs. Governments tend to impose or promote, rather than publicize.
Plasticity can make one more flexible, or, more rigid.
--- The Snow in Winter, metaphor, find a safe path, make a rut.
An element of all brain damage is to Shock learned use.
Motivation is a key to undoing learned destructive patterns.
In 2008, Dr. Doidge is speaking at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia University, as well as to financial research groups, educators, clinicians, businesses, the military, judges, and non-profit organizations.
Yen Cheong,
Assistant Director of Publicity, Viking Penguin
212-366-2275
In 2008, Dr. Doidge is speaking at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia University, as well as to financial research groups, educators, clinicians, businesses, the military, judges, and non-profit organizations.
After winning the E.J. Pratt Prize for Poetry at age 19, Doidge won early recognition from the literary critic Northrop Frye, who wrote that his work was “really remarkable... haunting and memorable.” At the University of Toronto, he studied classics and philosophy, and graduated with high distinction, then earned his medical degree. In New York, he simultaneously completed psychiatric and psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, followed by two years as a Columbia-National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow, and another year as a Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry at Columbia.
In 1994, Doidge won The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Saturday Night Literary Award, the most important award for an unpublished work in Canada, for his personal memoir, “The Suit.” He became editor-in-chief of Books in Canada—The Canadian Review of Books from 1995 to 1998 and, from 1998 to 2001, a newspaper columnist, writing “On Human Nature” in the National Post.
His series of literary portraits of exceptional people at moments of transformation appeared in Saturday Night magazine and won four Canadian National Magazine Gold Awards, including the National Magazine Award President’s Medal, for the best article published in Canada in the year 2000. That account of his intimate conversation with the Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, called “Love, Friendship and the Art of Dying,” was “brilliantly sustained from beginning to end,” said the judges, who continued, “This multi-leveled piece about writing, friendship, life and death opens a door into the complex lives of two extraordinary literary figures.”
It was out of these kinds of portraits — and Doidge’s conviction that neuroplasticity represents the single most important new idea in our understanding of the human brain in hundreds of years, with immense consequences for our understanding of human nature, human and therapeutic possibilities, and human culture — that The Brain That Changes Itself emerged. The Brain That Changes Itself is being translated in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Norwegian.
Dr. Doidge served as Head of the Psychotherapy Centre and the Assessment Clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and taught in the departments of Philosophy, Political Science, Law and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has published on trauma, problems in love, psychiatric diagnoses and intensive psychotherapies, and is the author of standards and guidelines for the practice of intensive psychotherapy that are widely used in Canada. In 1993 he presented his research at the White House in Washington, D.C., and is credited with helping preserve these treatments as part of the Canadian and Australian health care systems.
He is a Training Analyst (a trainer of psychoanalysts) in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Doidge has won a number of scientific awards, including the U.S. National Psychiatric Endowment Award in Psychiatry; the American Psychoanalytic Association’s CORST Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture; the Canadian Psychoanalytic Association’s M. Prados Prize; and election to the American College of Psychoanalysts for “many outstanding achievements in psychiatry and psychoanalysis... and national leadership in psychiatry.”
He has written over 170 articles, and his popular writing has appeared in Reader’s Digest, as the back-page essay for Time Magazine, in Saturday Night, Maclean's, UPI, Gravitas, Books in Canada, The Medical Post, The Melbourne Age, The Weekly Standard and the Chicago Sun-Times, and is frequently anthologized in college texts on how to write. Dr. Doidge has given keynote lectures in North America, Europe and Australia.
Fast ForWord®, Scientific Learning.
http://www.scilearn.com/products/index.php
Our products use patented technologies that leverage the science and opportunity of brain plasticity. By exercising processing skills through intensive, adaptive activity, actual physical changes occur in the brain. “Gray matter” can thicken, neural connections can be forged and strengthened, and these physical changes to the brain can result in changes to our abilities. Fast ForWord® products trigger change in the brain and provide an optimal foundation for learning and reading success.
Developed by four internationally renowned research scientists, Drs. Mike Merzenich, Paula Tallal, Bill Jenkins, and Steve Miller, the Fast ForWord family of products works to improve the language to literacy continuum. Starting with basic language skills and moving through increasingly challenging and sophisticated reading skills, all of our products strictly adhere to the principles of neuroscience upon which they were developed, and all are designed to increase processing efficiency.
With Fast ForWord software, great results are the norm, rather than the exception. The technologies behind the products were specifically designed to match the ability and progress of each learner. This ability to adapt to the student means they are always challenged, but not frustrated. This optimal learning experience means that students who use Fast ForWord products often make an average 1 - 2 years gain in reading skills in as little as 8 to 12 weeks.
Our Founders' Story
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
and Neuroimaging in Cognition and Behavior
September 25-26, 2008
Following the success of the Magstim inaugural meeting in May 2007 in London (UK), we are pleased to announce the first North American event “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Neuroimaging in Cognition and Behavior”, that Magstim has organized in collaboration with Dr. A.P. Strafella - University of Toronto, Dr. O. Monchi - University of Montreal, Dr. A. Ptito - McGill University and Rogue Research.
To reflect the breadth and international scope of this field, distinguished speakers were invited from across the fields of Neuroscience and Neurology with an agenda covering a variety of highly relevant topics in Cognition and Behavior over the two days. They include: Profs. V. Walsh, S. Grafton, E. Wasserman, O. Pogarell, H.R. Siebner, Z. Nahas, and M. Petrides.
The Brain Fitness Program. --- 866-599-6463 ---
http://www.brainplasticity.com/products/brain_fitness_program/
requires a fast (1 Gz min), Windows based computer to run.
$395 Brain Fitness Program for One Person
$495 Brain Fitness Program for Two People
$595 Brain Fitness Program with Coaching Kit
Posit Science® Cortex™ with InSight™ Visual processing program
$395 Cortex with InSight for One Person
$495 Cortex with InSight for Two People
The Brain Fitness Program has been subjected to several large, rigorous clinical trials that demonstrate it speeds up auditory processing by 131%, improves memory by an average of 10 years.
The Six Brain Fitness Program Classic Exercises
- High or Low? (Frequency sweeps)
Your task is to identify two auditory “sweeps” (sounds that sweep up or down across frequencies). The sweeps speed up as you improve, so that the exercise is always pushing your brain to speed up too.
Primary focus: Auditory processing speed
- Tell Us Apart (Phonemes)
Choose which of two similar syllables you heard. It’s harder than you think—the sounds are synthesized by the computer to focus your neural processing.
Primary focus: Discriminating sounds
- Match It! (Syllables)
In this game of Memory (also called Concentration), you click “cards” to match sounds together. Processed speech and similar sounds make this exercise a serious workout!
Primary focus: Sound precision
- Sound Replay (Syllables)
Try to remember a series of syllables, then click the buttons representing those syllables in order. As in Match It!, the speech is specially processed and the syllables are similar to one another. To challenge your brain even more, the exercise adds syllables as you improve.
Primary focus: Sound sequencing
- Listen and Do (Sentences)
In this exercise, you listen to a series of instructions, then follow them in order. The exercise begins with two fairly simple instructions and works you up to as many as six highly detailed instructions.
Primary focus: Working memory
- Story Teller (Narratives)
After listening to a story segment, you answer details about what you heard. The story segments grow longer as your memory gets stronger!
Primary focus: Narrative memory
regular use can range from 15 minutes to as much time as you like (for maximum benefit, we recommend completing 35-40 hours within three months.
Specific auditory targets include:
- Speeding up auditory processing.
As people grow older, their speed of auditory processing gradually slows—but speech coming in does not! Speeding up auditory processing helps you keep up with rapid-fire speech you might hear when participating in an important meeting, talking to your grandchildren, or listening to a comedian.
- Clarifying sound discrimination.
When you are able to hear each sound in each word with more clarity, you can store clearer, more detailed memories of what you heard. You can then recall these memories with clearer detail later, helping you be more fluid in conversation and find words “on the tip of your tongue” more easily.
- Sharpening sound precision.
Training your brain to hear sounds with similar structures (such as /d/ and /t/ or /s/ and /st/) with greater precision helps you encode memories more accurately. This is what helps you remember if your new co-worker is named Don or Tom or Tim or John, whether your friend said to meet at 3:15 or 3:50, and much more.
- Improving sound sequencing.
Sound sequencing describes the brain’s ability to remember what you hear in order. Being able to hold strings of information in mind long enough to use them can help you stay on top of daily tasks. For example, many people have said that they remember what to buy at the store even when they leave their list at home.
- Strengthening auditory working memory.
Working memory is what enables you to keep information in mind long enough to act on it or transfer it to long-term memory. Improving your auditory working memory helps you remember and follow information that comes in through sound—from a list of assigned to-do items to how to care for an exotic plant.
- Enhancing narrative memory.
Much of what we hear each day comes in through narratives—from our children, teachers, tour guides, friends, co-workers, favorite actors. As memory for narrative details improves, people often feel willing to take on new activities or tasks with the confidence that they will be able to succeed with ease. Traveling to new places, joining a new class, and accepting more responsibility at work are a few examples.
Taken together, these changes help people feel better equipped to communicate in every setting, making them more confident and more willing to engage in new experiences.
- Neuromodulators
The Brain Fitness Program (like all Posit Science programs) is designed to exercise the brain systems that produce neuromodulators—brain chemicals that are crucial for learning and memory. Natural production of these chemicals decreases with age. Our programs are specifically designed to boost that production by:
- rewarding the brain (which stimulates the production of dopamine)
- surprising the brain (which stimulates the production of norepinephrine)
- encouraging deep focus (which stimulates the production of acetylcholine)
TESTS: depends on Macromedia Shockwave 10.1 installed,
and, Posit Science installs other programs on your computer, including zest_sweep,
Brain Speed Test, 10 minutes.
Speech in Noise,
Word List Recall,
Posit Science® Cortex™ with InSight™
Visual processing program
The Five InSight Exercises
Completing each exercise requires about 6 to 8 hours of training.
- Bird Safari™
You’re a photographer shooting local birds in Florida, California, and Costa Rica. To get the shots, you have to locate the right bird among a group of similar birds when they flash quickly on screen.
Primary focus: Visual precision, visual processing speed, useful field of view.
- Jewel Diver™
You’re a deep sea diver tracking sunken jewels. To collect the jewels, you have to follow them on screen when they’re hidden by a bubble or fish. The more you can track the more you collect!
Primary focus: Divided attention, visual precision, useful field of view.
- Master Gardener™
You’re a gardener tending a magical garden. To grow plants, you must match pictures after they appear briefly on screen, one after the other. The last matching picture you click will sprout a garden flower!
Primary focus: Visual working memory, visual precision, useful field of view.
- Road Tour™
You’re taking a trip on Route 66 from California to Illinois. Along the way, you stop to see roadside attractions. But to reach them, you have to spot cars in the center of your vision while also identifying road signs on the edges of the screen.
Primary focus: Useful field of view, divided attention, visual processing speed.
- Sweep Seeker™
You’re on an adventure collecting artifacts in Mayan, Oceania, and Anasazi ruins. To get to the artifacts, you have to break tiles by identifying visual “sweeps” (frequency bands) in various colors and frequencies.
Primary focus: Visual processing speed, visual precision.
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