How does brain integration work?
Building Permanent Brain Pathways Improves Learning
Studies show that certain physical activities can integrate parts of the brain and cause them to work together. Specific activities can stimulate parts of the brain forming electrical pathways between those parts. When the activities are repeated properly, the pathways become permanent, similar to wiring. When the brain has good wiring between all parts, reading, remembering, hearing, organizing and expression become easier.
In the 1960’s two medical doctors, Dr. Doman and Dr. Delacato were working in a rehabilitation hospital with head injury patients. They wanted to find out how head injury patients could recover functions like reading that they lost in car accidents. They soon got interested in how the brain gets wired up for reading and other activities. They believed that they could find a way to reactivate the process.
Developmental Stages and Rebuilding Brain Pathways
Their purpose was to help these patients recover brain functioning. Children are not born wired up for all tasks. As they do certain things their brains get wired up for those tasks. In Dr. Delacato’s book A New Start for the Child with Reading Problems he stated that opportunity for use helped the nervous system develop. If a child does not pass through a stage, no matter what the restriction, a problem is almost certain to develop.
The doctors discovered that the practice that children need is creeping and crawling, exploring and examining, and looking and listening. Babies go through different stages as they grow that create six “patterns of development.” If they miss any of these stages, they can have learning difficulties later in life. When a person has a head injury, it can cause these pathways to break. Therapists rebuild these broken electrical pathways through exercise, thus recovering many of the client’s abilities.
Reactivating the Brain’s Wiring at Any Age
In therapy we can go back and make up for those deficits in the developmental process, children as young as three and one-half or as old as sixty can see exciting results.
The Whole Brain Is Necessary
Different Brain Regions Handle Different Reading Tasks
Research shows that separate brain functions are localized in different areas. When reading, the left side of the brain is used to sound out words and analyze thoughts, while the right side is used to remember sight words and visualize descriptions.
Physical Activity Strengthens Hemisphere Communication
Physical exercise promotes coordination between the brain’s hemispheres by increasing neural signaling across the corpus callosum. This enhanced communication helps the left and right sides work together more effectively, making reading smoother and more automatic.
Insufficient Hemisphere Connectivity Causes Inefficiency and Fatigue
When there is not enough neural “wiring” between the brain’s hemispheres, the transfer of information from one side to the other is slow and inefficient. This lack of connectivity forces the brain to work harder during reading and writing, making these activities mentally exhausting without improving performance.
Published References
Silverman, Linda Kreger. Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner. Denver. Colorado: DeLeon Publishing, 2002. ISBN; 193218600X.
Linda Silverman provides us with a holistic-visual-spatial perspective of the Complexities of brilliant, but academically challenged minds. She offers an understanding of their upside-down world. More importantly she tells us how their struggles can be overcome.
— Ronald D. Davis, author of The Gift of Dyslexia.
This book includes a bibliography, and information on the symptomology of learning disabilities . It also includes biographical information on famous people such as Einstein and Thomas Edison who struggled in school.