Education Special Section Brain Training Neuroplasticity Research Offers Hope to People with Dyslexia by Carolyn Cosmos Your brain is plastic—but don’t worry, that’s good news. It means you can learn new things and correct brain errors throughout your lifespan—even into your old age, although it does work best during your youth. This con-cept of “neuroplasticity” is revolutionary and relatively new—and nowhere does it offer more hope than in the treatment of learning disorders such as dyslexia. Dyslexia affects vision and hearing as well as the ability to read, write and spell. Typically found in people with normal or even superior intelligence, it can lead to many problems in school and a host of behavioral issues such as underachievement, misdiagnoses, low self esteem, social isolation, and a plethora of variations on human suffering not always visible to others. But all that’s changing. Brain research and a growing focus on the prospect that brains can be rewired are offering promising approaches to childhood and adult learning disorders, resulting in new programs and treatments for dyslexia. And such intervention is key because it’s estimated that approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia. Researchers now believe the disorder has different causes. But although it appears in various forms, dyslexia always affects reading—an important skill that children learn late compared to the age when they typically learn to talk. So why this gap? “Reading is one of the hardest things our brains do,” said dyslexia researcher Dr. Christopher Walsh, head of the Genetics Division at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “It demands we use many different parts of our brain at once.” In a recent study, Walsh and his team looked at patients with PNH (periventricular nodular heterotopia), a type of dyslexia caused by a rare genetic disorder. Such patients process language slowly and have difficulty reading, which Walsh discovered was most likely caused by disruptions in their brains’ “white matter.” Brain imaging showed that PNH subjects had disorganized bundles of the nerve fibers that are abundant in white matter. These brain bundles, which are usually highly efficient highways between brain cells, erratically tracked around clumps of “gray matter” deposited in the wrong places—deep into the brain’s white matter. (The brain’s gray matter is a lavish coating of neurons over the cerebral cortex that is usually thought of as the center of intelligence.) The subjects’ PNH brain disorganization meant that their nerve connections slowed down. But why look at a brain condition as rare as PNH—a condition most people with dyslexia don’t have? Walsh defended the practical as well as the academic benefits of basic research, arguing that brain studies offer a better understanding of all the different varieties of dyslexia in the world. “The faster we can learn what a patient’s problem is, the faster we can convert that to better treatment,” Walsh said in an interview posted on the hospital’s Web site. And by developing a clearer understanding of what the various forms of dyslexia might be, practitioners can better tailor treatments to each child’s specific needs. “The more we know about these genetic disorders, the earlier we can intervene,” Walsh said, noting that such knowledge could translate into treatments starting at birth. A second study coming out of Children’s Hospital in Boston recently looked at another piece of the dyslexia puzzle: problems in processing sounds and difficulties in linking sounds to letters on a page. The study—published in the journal Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience in October and led by Nadine Gaab of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Children’s in Boston—used brain-imaging and brain-training software to examine and modify the difficulties children with dyslexia have with language sounds. Gaab believes the study’s findings could eventually help with early intervention and allow dyslexia to be diagnosed before children reach the age of reading. She also said the research suggests new ways of treating dyslexia, such as music training. The Gaab study came about in part because of the theories and practical inventions of brain-research pioneer Paula Tallal, co-director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Tallal, in fact, is one of the co-developers of the brain-training software that Gaab and her colleagues used in their work. In the 1970s, Tallal introduced the idea that children with dyslexia and reading problems could have an underlying issue with processing sounds. She helped develop software designed to rewire stuttering brains, which were increasingly seen as malleable. However, her auditory ideas had never been tested through brain imaging until Gaab came along and tried it. Gaab imaged how the brains of 9- to 12-year-old children responded to fast-moving versus slow-moving sounds, in addition to comparing the brains of normal children to those with developmental dyslexia. Although Gaab didn’t study language sounds themselves, her work is pertinent because general sound perception in infants affects later language skills by creating the brain maps used in speaking and reading. For instance, infants with dyslexia often have trouble with faster-moving sounds. An example is the rapid “d” at the start of “Dada” or “Daddy.” Children with dyslexia don’t hear it rush past very well. Their brain map for the “d” sound and other quick sounds can be messy and out of kilter—making later reading tasks difficult. Enter software that trains the brain. Tallal and several colleagues developed software games featuring sounds, which became part of a suite of educational computer products known as Fast ForWord (FFW) language software, developed by Scientific Learning, an Oakland, Calif., company founded by Tallal and other scientists. Next Page

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