The woman who changed her brain
Today I was able to take some time-in-lieu and go to the Sydney Writer’s Festival to hear Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, author of The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, speak. I was a little surprised that the Sydney Theatre sold out days ago for this event, but obviously there are a lot of people out there interested in ways to change the brain. It was sooo fascinating. Barbara had quite a lovely manner of speaking and was very articulate, and because she has obviously spent so much time immersed in, and researching, this material she was able to speak in-depth about every and any aspect of it.
As a child she had many and varied learning disabilities. The entire left side of her body didn’t function well, she had spatial and co-ordination problems, she was unable to understand meaning in language and grasp relationships (so if you told her the book was on the table, she had to think hard about what that meant because it involved a relationship between the book and the table), she couldn’t read clocks at all and yet she managed to get through school almost purely on being able to memorise things (apparently she became a workaholic in 1st grade to do so) and when she went to university she actually slept in the library, for only 4 hours, because the rest of her waking life she was trying hard to find ways keep up. Then she stumbled across some research, initially about rats and brain stimulation, and then later about a fellow who had taken a bullet wound to the head during WWII, and realised that she had all the same problems as this person. So she devised her own exercises for the part of her brain where she suspected there was a cognitive problem, with amazing results.
She now runs a school where they have programs based on difficulties within 19 different cognitive-function areas, and they have had extraordinary results. But, she was quick to emphasise that changing the brain requires hard work. Kids (or adults) go to the school and spend four hours a day on cognitive exercises, and after three to four months they begin to notice improvements, so it’s not an overnight fix. But many people leave the school after 1-3 years with normal function, and because they have basically altered the way their brains work and their capacity to learn there are no signs that people regress once they leave the school.
When it came to question time there were obviously a lot of people in the audience frustrated with the ineffectiveness of current tutoring those they know receive for learning disabilities, and many people wanted to know when she is establishing a school in Australia. Interesting.
I don’t even know why I am so interested in this. I don’t know anyone particularly closely who has significant learning disabilities, and was blessed to have the capacity to probably take a whole lot of things for granted when it came to learning myself. Yet I am intrigued.
I was quite pleased with myself that I managed to get out of the writer’s festival without actually buying any more books (I did carry one or two around for a while, then put them back), not even hers, but I would like to read it sometime.