A Personal Journey Into the World of the Brain

Barbara Arrowsmith Young is the Canadian educator, author, entrepreneur and lecturer. She is the founder of Arrowsmith School in Toronto and the controversial Arrowsmith Program which forms the basis of the school’s teaching method.  The genesis of the Arrowsmith Program of cognitive exercises lies in Barbara Arrowsmith Young’s journey of discovery and innovation to overcome her own severe learning disabilities. On a visit to Australia, Barbara Arrowsmith Young addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 15 March 2017. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of her talk.

A PERSONAL JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD OF THE BRAIN

BARBARA ARROWSMITH YOUNG

I’d like to thank Gerard Henderson for that introduction and Anne Henderson for organising this event this afternoon and the members of The Sydney Institute for coming out to hear me talk about what I’m most passionate about – the human brain and its incredible capacity for change. Tonight, I want to take you on a journey of exploring, experimenting and engaging with the world and also historic human resilience. It’s a story of how I came to explore the territory of the human brain, how I set out on a journey of hope and discovery to find a solution to my own very severe and crippling learning difficulties.

Growing up, I always felt there had to be a path out of my struggles and the suffering that went along with having learning difficulties. On this journey, I met remarkable people who helped me find my way out of my difficulties. They also helped me set up my first experiments to see whether there was human neuroplasticity and whether the brain did have the capacity for change. When I saw those results, I wanted to go out in the world to work with others with the same difficulties, or were struggling with other kinds of learning difficulties.

Science has taught us that a brain does shape who we are. We have an incredible organ we carry with us everywhere that we really can’t escape and it’s incredibly complex. There’s something of the order of 86-100 billion neurons that we carry in our head. To put that into perspective, you think about the world’s population somewhere around 7-8 billion people. There are also several hundred trillion connections that we have in our brain. To put that into perspective there are more connections in our brain than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

We often make the assumption that our brain works the same as everybody else’s brain. That is not the case. Each brain is incredibly unique. Recent research from Carnegie Mellon University, looking at 700 brains found even identical twins only shared 12 per cent of connectivity patterns. Think about somebody you know fairly well or look at the person next to you. Note that there are physical differences between you – your eye colour, the shape of your nose, your stature. There are actually more differences between your two brains than all those physical characteristics combined.

So our brain really does shape us and make us uniquely who we are. What I find promising is the concept of neuroplasticity, which simply put means that our brain is capable of change through experience, stimulation and learning. Not only does our brain shape us but, if we can understand and harness these principles, there’s a possibility that we can shape our brains. I’ve worked with people as young as five and as old as 81. To me, what’s encouraging is neuroplasticity across the lifespan. The 81-year-old made the same progress as the 12-year-old in terms of addressing cognitive areas.

I began my schooling in the late 1950s at a time that I would call the pre-neuroplastic paradigm. When I started my school, the belief was the brain was fixed, hard wired. If there was a problem related to your brain you needed to learn to accept it, to live within your limitations because the brain you were born with was the brain that you die with. So I was told in Grade 1 that I had a mental block, that I wouldn’t amount to much and that all of my learning would be an incredible struggle. It felt like a life sentence, a life ahead of incredible struggle. The turning point in my life came in August 1977 when someone handed me a book. It was on the pages of this book that I met a Russian soldier who was struggling with exactly the same problems that I had.

On 2 March 1943 in Vyazma, Western Russia, a sunny, almost warm but damp day, the soldiers were chilled, their army-issue felt boots soaked. Lieutenant Lyova Zazetsky, just 23 years old, commanded a platoon of flame-throwers – part of a contingent pushing back against the German invaders dug into the top of the steep and rocky banks of the frozen Vorya River. Comrade Zazetsky looked west, where they would soon be headed, talking to his men, encouraging them while they waited. Finally, the order came to advance, and the only sound Zazetsky heard was the clank and screech of armour stirring. In a low crouch, he moved across the river ice at a pace between walking and running. The enemy began to fire. Machine-gun bullets whizzed over his head, and he dropped instinctively under the hail of artillery.

Then nothing. Zazetsky’s next memory was of becoming conscious “in a tent blazing with light” He wrote, “All I can remember is that the doctors and aides were holding me down. . . . I was screaming, gasping for breath.” A bullet had penetrated his helmet, then his skull, and had done massive damage to the left occipital-parietal region of his brain, leading to a prolonged coma and severely affecting his ability to reason. With damage to this area, the world of making connections and understanding relationships was lost.

Even after hours of patient explanation, Zazetsky could not fathom that an elephant was bigger than a fly (he knew that one was big and one small but could not grasp the relationship between the two; the words bigger and smaller confounded him). “Since I was wounded,” Zazetsky wrote, “I’ve only been able to compare one word with another – one idea. And here there were so many different ideas that I got awfully confused.”

Unable to see the relationships between things, Zazetsky  saw the world as separate parts. Even something as simple as connecting the big and little hand on a clock was now impossible. He no longer understood logic, cause and effect, grammar, or dialogue in a film. For Zazetsky, the words in a movie came too quickly. “Before I’ve had a chance to figure out what the actors are saying,” he wrote, “a new scene begins.” The bullet had damaged the part of Zazetsky’s brain that receives and processes input necessary for understanding the world. He could perceive properly with his eyes but could not deploy his brain to link perceptions or ideas, so he lived with disconnected elements. As Zazetsky put it in his diary, “I’m in a kind of fog all the time. . . . All that flashes through my mind are images, hazy visions that suddenly appear and disappear. . . . I simply can’t understand what these mean.”

“This strange illness I have,” he wrote, “is like living without a brain.”

In the book The Man with a Shattered World, Zazetsky’s journal describes his problems and the Russian neuropsychologist Luria describes what was going wrong in his brain leading to these problems. And when I read this, I thought this man was living my life several decades earlier and halfway around the world. What Zazetsky hadn’t been able to do after his wound, I had not been able to do since birth. I knew I didn’t have a piece of shrapnel in my head but I knew that there was something wrong with my brain and here were my beginnings.

At six years of age, I heard an exchange that filled me with a quiet horror. I had accompanied my mother to an after-school parent-teacher meeting to discuss the teacher’s concerns about my slow progress. “Barbara,” the teacher explained to my mother, “has a mental block.” At that time, the term “learning disability” didn’t exist so I was diagnosed with a mental block. As children do, I understood this truth quite literally. Evidently, there was a chunk of wood lodged in my brain, and it would have to be removed. The teacher was almost right. The word block missed the mark, but blockage was pretty close. For the first 26 years of my life – I am now 59 years old – I lived in a dense fog not unlike Zazetsky. For me, what he talked about – not being able to connect ideas, not being able to see relationships – was what I struggled with.

When I started this work I could not read a two handed clock. If you think about how you tell time, you see the relationship between the hour hand and the minute hand. For me, it was the part of the brain that understood relationships, connected ideas, cause and effect. I didn’t understand why things happened. To me ,it felt like I was buffeted all the time by a series of random events. There was no understanding of why people did things, no cause and effect. I struggled with understanding humour or jokes because I couldn’t understand irony. Not wanting to feel left out, I would laugh when other people laughed but I had no idea what they were laughing about. I was vulnerable to con artists. One of the ways you know you’re being conned is you hear the logical inconsistencies in what somebody is saying. For me, there was no logic so there were no logical inconsistencies. I would have to read material over and over and over again.

Luria talked about someone who can never verify meaning. They live in an incredibly uncertain world, a cloud of the unknowing, because they can never come to a certainty that they’ve understood something. I would read a page 5, 10, 15 times, always hypothesising as to what the author was intending but never certain. I lived in an incredible world of uncertainty. When someone spoke to me, I relied on his or her facial expression and intonation to get a general sense of what was being said, but I was never sure. In class, how could I possibly know the answer when the question itself was invariably unclear? In exams, l was never sure I had interpreted the question correctly, and when I wrote my answer I could never be sure I conveyed the meaning I intended’.

I had a phenomenal memory, a photographic memory. I would memorise all my notebooks. I could close my eyes and see the first word of my notebook and I could go through to the last word on the last page of my notebook. I got through school using my memory. I would see the question on the exam and then flip through my memory and try to make a match to what I thought might be the answer to that question. But I was never certain. Sometimes I made a really good match and I’d get 90 per cent. Sometimes I did a really poor match and I’d get 10 per cent. My teachers concluded that if I could get 90 per cent I must have really studied, but for that 10 per cent I didn’t study. Well I studied equally hard to get that 10 per cent as I did for the 90. That’s what it’s like having a learning disability. You have a brain that’s capable and incapable at the same time. There are some things you can do with ease while other things only come with incredible effort or not at all.

I felt sheer blind terror as I set out to accomplish a task I knew was impossible. I used to line all my notebooks up on my bed and kneel down at my bed before starting to memorise everything. I knew how hard it would be and I would just cry. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was putting myself almost into a zen state of mind, clearing out all emotion. I was different but I had no idea why. My world consisted of a series of seemingly random events, ones I could not understand and over which I had no control. I was clinging to a cliff by my fingernails, and the only questions were these: When would I fall? Who would catch me? The answers, apparently, were “Soon” and “No one”.

So what changed for me?

I came across that work by Luria and encountered Susan Tedeschi because when you’re solving a problem you have to understand the nature of the problem. Now I understood it was my brain that wasn’t working in a very specific way. That’s the first step. Then I came across the work of Mark Rosenzweig, a psychologist at Berkeley, who was looking at the concept of neuroplasticity in the 1960s and 1970s. He was working with rats and found that if you put rats in a really enriched stimulating environment, they became better at learning mazes. Like a rat intelligence test.

Then he looked at their brains afterwards. He found that the brains of those rats with the enrichment and stimulation had changed physiologically. They had more dendrites, allowing for more synapses, and better neurotransmission. They had more neurotransmitters, enlarged capillaries, so more blood flow, more glial cells. Their brains had changed physiologically as a result of the stimulation which he concluded had led to the better learning. At that point, a light bulb went off in my brain. If rats have neuroplasticity, surely humans must have neuroplasticity. This was in 1978.

I went to my professors at graduate school saying I knew what my problem was. It was my brain. They told me learning difficulties had nothing to do with the brain. I was desperate at this point. I was in graduate school. I was working seven days a week, 20 hours a day, sleeping four hours a night, and I’d now compromised my immune system. There’s research now to suggest that individuals with learning difficulties tend to have more problems with their physical health because of all the stress hormones that affect the immune system.

I didn’t see a future for myself at this point because everything was so much of a struggle. So I thought maybe I can put these two lines of research together. If I can understand what that part of the brain does maybe I can create a test, task or activity to work that part of the brain to stimulate it, to strengthen it. A way to learn the way it’s designed to learn. Then I created my first exercise. I selected clocks. I was by then 26 and couldn’t tell time. Luria had talked about somebody with that difficulty. After hundreds of hours practising reading the clock, eventually, I could tell time.

After that, I kept adding complexity which is now one of the things we know that drives neuroplastic change. I kept adding more and more hands to that clock to force my brain to process more relationships. It was when I came to processing four relationships, simultaneously, that I knew there was human neuroplasticity. I can now do things that, with the best will in the world before, I’ve never been able to do. I now lived in real time whereas before I talked about living in lag time. I had a good memory and I also had a verbatim auditory memory. If I was in a conversation with somebody, I could memorise what they were saying, but I never understood what they were saying. Like a little recorder, I would walk away and play that conversation over and over again. It might take two hours and I might come to an understanding of what they said. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. But now, for the first time in my life, I was part of human discourse.

It was profound. I could listen to what someone was saying. I could understand it in real time. I could make a comment. I could understand their comment back. I could actually have a dialogue, and a conversation, which had never been possible for me before. I also could now understand mathematics and I went back and taught myself all of the elementary, high school and college mathematics I had missed. I understood it now from first principles rather than just by memorising formulae. And now I could understand irony and was no longer vulnerable to con artists because I could those logical inconsistencies.

For the first time in my life I started to integrate those fractured elements and become a whole complete person. As one parent said to me, school is just a metaphor for life. If an individual is struggling with learning disabilities it will affect them outside the classroom door just as this had affected me both academically and in relationships. I didn’t have relationships because I couldn’t understand people. Now I could have relationships and I could understand people.

I also had a problem where I couldn’t register the location of sensation on the left side of my body. If I put my hand on a hot burner, my brain would register pain but it wouldn’t register where the pain was coming from. So I would leave my hand on the hot burner. It was a real problem. I was accident-prone. Once I started driving a car, by extension, if I didn’t know where the left side of my body was, I didn’t know where the left side of that car was. So my car was dented and dinged up and banged.I created a very different exercise to address that problem because it was a different part of the brain. I can now register the location of sensation on the left side of my body.

I also had a spatial difficulty. I couldn’t construct three dimensional space inside my head so, as a child, I would get lost in my friends’ houses because I couldn’t create a map of where I was relative to where they were in the house. I struggled with crossing a street because when you’re crossing a street you’re creating a mental map of where you are relative to those cars. I couldn’t do that. I’d walk blocks out of my way to find a stop sign or a stoplight where I knew the cars had to stop and I would be safe crossing the street. My other strategy was to wait by the side of the street until somebody else came along and follow them across and hope they knew what they were doing. Geography, geometry, anything-organic, like chemistry, that involved spatial construction or spatial relations was incredibly difficult for me. So I went into Luria’s work, tried to understand what that part of the brain did, created an exercise and addressed that problem. Now I can actually read maps.

I was a pile person. For me if something went into a drawer it didn’t exist because I couldn’t think into three-dimensional space.I had to leave everything in line of sight so that I knew that I had it and where it was. If you have somebody in your life that’s a pile person they might have this difficulty. Some of these problems are inherited. My mother had this difficulty, as did I. As a child, we’d get into a car together. We’d know where we were starting, we knew where we wanted to end up, but there were no maps in either of our heads. It was like a black hole in between our starting point and our destination. My mother had a good attitude; she said it would be an adventure, we’ll get there eventually. We always did but never the same way twice.

When I understood more about these cognitive functions, I asked my mother had this impacted her? She shared with me that she had gone to university to study chemistry. In her first year she was asked to leave the Chemistry department because she couldn’t construct the molecules. And if we think about cognitive functions they work on a continuum. Somebody can be exceptionally gifted in an area, someone can have average functioning, mild, moderate or severe level of difficulty. My mother and I were at the severe end of that spectrum. I have four brothers. One of my brothers has a mild difficulty with that cognitive function and he did become a chemist and worked at the University of Toronto for his career. But he went into physical chemistry rather than organic chemistry. He could construct those molecules but it was extra effort and energy so he picked a part of chemistry that didn’t require quite so much on that.

What I’ve learnt with this work is there’s no part of the brain that’s irrelevant. If someone tells you that you only use 10 per cent of your brain, kindly tell them that that’s not the case. Over the course of the day, you use every part of your brain to engage in the world, to learn things, to navigate. There’s no part that isn’t critical. If there’s a part that isn’t working the way it was designed to, at the level it was designed to, it will have some impact.

As adults, we probably all know that there’s something that we’re not exceptional at. Usually we can find ways around that to compensate or we just don’t go into that territory. With the individuals that we work with in this program, they tend to have multiple areas of difficulty, just like I had. It’s hard for them to compensate because there are too many things causing difficulty. There’s a cognitive load. They walk into a classroom and are asked to do things that take them so much more effort and energy than the other students. Certainly that was my experience. So then you start to engage in behaviours that the teachers don’t particularly appreciate. The attention wanders. I spent around half my Grade One class in the washroom because that was a nicer place for me to be than to be in the classroom.

I work with adults in this program from around the world. I have something I call a cognitive mismatch. A lot of adults have a cognitive profile that isn’t compatible with what they’re doing in their career. Imagine a person with kinaesthetic perception, the difficulty I had with the left side of my body, and they work as a butcher. They don’t know where the left side of their body is in space and they’ve got a sharp knife in one hand and they’re cutting things. The first time I met a man that had this difficulty, he walked into my school with his left hand all wrapped up in bandages because he was cutting himself. He still wanted to be a butcher. We addressed his problem and now he won’t cut himself.

I worked with somebody on the Olympic ski jump team in Canada who had a very mild imperception in the left side of his body. It did not really interfere with much of what he would do in life but when you’re coming down those shoots at that kind of speed, he would tend to fall with increased frequency to the left side. We addressed that and he no longer falls to his left side so much.

Some people struggle with being able to recognise the look of the world, what I call object recognition or the refrigerator dysfunction. This is the person who opens the fridge and says, “Where’s the mustard?” when it’s right there in front of them. They don’t hold the look of the thing to match it up with what they’re actually thinking. A person with that difficulty won’t like shopping. They’ll walk by the object that they want and miss it. They don’t like meditation because they can’t visualise in meditation, they can’t hold the happy place they want go, that calms them down. They’ll get lost not because they can’t read maps but because they can’t navigate using landmarks. They don’t remember the look of the place that they’ve been before.

The student I first created this exercise for was studying at the Ontario College of Art, a very prestigious college in Toronto. She wanted to be an illustrator but had this difficulty. She would draw a cat and leave the whiskers off or she’d draw a coat and leave the buttons off. It is a problem if you want to be an illustrator and you can’t hold visual details. So we addressed this problem and she’s now won multiple awards in Canada for her illustrations. She doesn’t leave details out.

You would recall Oliver Sacks’ work – the man who mistook his wife for a hat. I worked with an individual who had traumatic brain injury in this region. The first day he was leaving the classroom he tried to walk out through a filing cabinet because it was rectangular and had a handle. To him, it looked like a door because he couldn’t discriminate all of the visual details. This is cognitive mismatch, or what I also call human error.

I worked with a student who was doing his residency in pathology at a teaching hospital in the United States and he was examining a slide. The patient had had breast cancer, chemotherapy and radiation. They were they in remission. My student knew how important this was so he was being very careful. He was just about to sign off that his examination showed remission when his supervisor arrived and asked why he had missed some cells, which were cancer. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen them, he hadn’t registered what they were. He realised he had to exit out of his program and work on that function so he wouldn’t make that error again.

I also worked with a pilot who had a problem with auditory memory. To me, this was really worrisome. He would get the air traffic controller to repeat the instructions over and over again because he couldn’t remember them the first time he heard them. I used to say if I was flying, I wanted to know where he was flying so I would not be in the same airspace. The better solution was to address the problem which is what we did. Now he can hold those instructions and remember what he’s supposed to do.

When I did the interviews for my book, we worked with a transcriber, a transcription service that transcribed all the interviews. Every time I got the interviews back and started reading through I immediately knew it was Linda doing a particular transcription because she had an auditory speech discrimination problem. She would transcribe what she heard into something that sounded kind of close but it wasn’t accurate. For example in an interview, one of my brothers was joking about my mother and said, “Oh she wasn’t cold or evil.” It came back that my mother wasn’t “yet off the needle”. To me, it was obvious it was really hard for Linda because while listening to auditory information all the time, she had trouble discriminating it. If she had been a court reporter she wouldn’t keep her job because she would be wrongly transcribing information.

My book was first published in 2012. I had a vision at the end of the book of where I would like to see this work go. I always thought I was optimistic. I thought I would never see it in my lifetime. The vision was that every child starting Year 1 at school had the opportunity to have access to cognitive programs. So, part of the day, there would be cognitive programs, part of the day they’d be learning curriculum. If we enhance cognitive functioning it will enhance and improve learning. This would mean that the needy child, by Year three or four, would get identified as having a learning difficulty. And the adults that I work with that have had that unevenness in their profile addressed very early on. I believe any individual can benefit from good cognitive stimulation.

In the current version of the book, in the updated chapter, I report on the results from two schools, one in Australia and one in the United States, that are doing what I call the whole cohort model. We’re seeing the Year One students doing motor climbing outperforming the other three Year One classes on copying tasks and standardised tests. This happened with 30 minutes a day of cognitive function. Five students in kindergarten who were identified as needing reading recovery were sent to the group doing the cognitive exercise. Ten weeks into the program not one of them needed reading recovery. And there are many more examples of the success it is.

We are understanding more and more about neuroplasticity, more about the brain’s capacity to change. And it is how we utilise that knowledge which will make a difference in the lives of students.