Kees Poulus had trouble most of his life expressing his thoughts in words and writing.
His attention deficit disorder and dyslexia led him to attend a boarding school for dyslexic youth, but his learning disabilities persisted through high school.
An inability to hear his own thoughts without saying them out loud exacerbated a tendency to become easily distracted.
His friends joked that watching him cook was like watching a cooking show: every action was preceded by instructions he spoke out loud to himself, such as “now we crack the egg; now we stir the egg.”
It was while attending Vancouver’s Eaton Brain Improvement Centre (EBIC) that he started hearing his inner voice.
“All of a sudden I started talking to myself, but I wasn’t actually saying anything,” said Poulus, “I never thought I could speak in my head.”
He spent a part of Grade 12 doing schoolwork in the principal’s office, where there were few distractions, but today he’s working on a marketing degree at the University of Lethbridge.
He attributes his new-found cognitive clarity to a year-and- a-half he spent mentally exercising the weaker parts of his brain at EBIC, which is an adult-focused satellite program of the youth-oriented Eaton Arrowsmith Schools in Victoria and Vancouver.
Founded by Howard Eaton in 2005, the three schools use a teaching style that Toronto’s Barbara Arrowsmith Young created over 30 years ago. It’s grounded in neuroplasticity – the idea that the brain is malleable and can be rewired and strengthened through repetitive cognitive training and exercises.
Arrowsmith Young’s teaching model has caught on at schools around North America, although it’s largely a specialized tool for treating learning disabilities and brain injuries.
Neuroplasticity is gaining credibility as a teaching tool, thanks to a growing number of peer-reviewed studies as well as proponents such as Eaton, Arrowsmith Young and psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself.
Eaton, who has master of education degree and an undergraduate degree in psychology despite being diagnosed at a young age with severe developmental dyslexia, recently finished his own book.
In Brain School, he tells of children rewiring their brains through cognitive exercises to overcome learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
In a Business in Vancouver interview, he said that neuroplasticity and its cousin neurogenesis – the concept that neurons in the brain can mend and grow – were historically considered on the fringes of neuroscience.
“For decades [it] was thought the brain is hardwired and fixed like a computer,” said Eaton.
Exercises in the Arrowsmith program target the working memory – where the brain stores and manipulates information.
While some people might need to exercise the working memory related to speech, others might need to address the working memory related to writing or juggling numbers.
With a nod to logic theory, some Arrowsmith exercises train students to draw connections between different things or ideas: if idea A is true, then idea B must be related to idea C.
If those connections can be made repeatedly through practice, they’ll stick.
Eaton’s three schools in B.C. enrol 85 students a year, including 20 adults.
Students attend for five hours each weekday.
Annual enrolment for children costs $26,000; adult enrolment costs $22,000.
The cost is prohibitive for some, but Eaton provides bursaries and has placements for students from low-income families.
He said the Arrowsmith program is the only licensed full-time curriculum grounded in neuroplasticity.
That’s why families from Australia, Korea, Britain and elsewhere have moved to Vancouver so their children can attend Eaton’s school.
The Eaton schools are certified by the BC Teachers Federation and include math and English in the curriculum but no other courses required in B.C.’s public-school program. Students therefore can’t obtain a diploma through them.
Eaton said adults who enrol often do so in preparation for university or while doing part-time studies elsewhere to obtain their high-school diploma. Others have attended after having difficulty keeping jobs.
He said neuroplasticity’s remaining critics are largely in the traditional education system where learning disabilities are often still accommodated for through extra time on tests, books on cassette and scribes for students who have trouble with dyslexia or writing.
As a result, Eaton said they never overcome their disabilities.
“Neuroplasticity is no longer a myth,” he said. “It’s well-founded in neuroscience research. But the difficulty is translating that grounded scientific research into the schools of education, into the practice of treating children with disabilities.”
Arrowsmith’s approach to addressing learning disabilities head-on has essentially cured people like Poulus and Caroline Scott of their learning disabilities.
Scott always struggled with math. Now she’s working in an accounting department.
“[EBIC] made a huge difference,” she said. •