The Brain That Changes Itself

seconds and sixtieths of a second. At the end of many exhausting weeks, not only
could she read clocks faster than normal people, but she noticed improvements in
her other difficulties relating to symbols and began for the first time to grasp
grammar, math, and logic. Most important, she could understand what people
were saying as they said it. For the first time in her life, she began to live in real
time. Spurred on by her initial success, she designed exercises for her other
disabilities — her difficulties with space, her trouble with knowing where her
limbs were, and her visual disabilities — and brought them up to average level.
Barbara and Joshua Cohen married, and in 1980 they opened the Arrowsmith
School in Toronto. They did research together, and Barbara continued to develop
brain exercises and to run the school from day to day. Eventually they parted, and
Joshua died in 2000.
Because so few others knew about or accepted neuroplasticity or believed that the
brain might be exercised as though it were a muscle, there was seldom any
context in which to understand her work. She was viewed by some critics as
making claims — that learning disabilities were treatable — that couldn't be
substantiated. But far from being plagued by uncertainty, she continued to design
exercises for the brain areas and functions most commonly weakened in those
with learning disabilities. In these years before high-tech brain scans were
available, she relied on Luria's work to understand which areas or the brain
commonly processed which mental functions. Luria had formed his own map of
the brain by working with patients like Zazetsky. He observed where a soldier's
wound had occurred and related this location to the mental functions lost.
Barbara found that learning disorders were often milder versions of the thinking
deficits seen in Luria's patients. Applicants to the Arrowsmith School — children
and adults alike — undergo up to forty hours of assessments, designed to
determine precisely which brain functions are weak and whether they might be
helped. Accepted students, many of whom were distracted in regular schools, sit
quietly working at their computers. Some, diagnosed with attention-deficit as
well as learning disorders, were on Ritalin when they entered the school. As their
exercises progress, some can come off medication, because their attention
problems are secondary to their underlying learning disorders.
At the school, children who, like Barbara, had been unable to read a clock now
work at computer exercises reading mind-numbingly complex ten-handed clocks
(with hands not only for minutes, hours, and seconds but also for other time
divisions, such as days, months, years) in mere seconds. They sit quietly, with
intense concentration,
until they get enough answers right to progress to the nest level, when they shriek
out a loud "Yes!" and their computer screen lights up to congratulate them. By
the time they finish, they can read clocks far more complex than those any
"normal" person can read.