The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young at TEDxToronto

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young is the Creator and Director of Arrowsmith School and Arrowsmith Program, and the author of the international best-selling book "The Woman Who Changed Her Brain". She is recognized as the creator of one of the first practical applications of the principles of neuroplasticity to the treatment of learning disorders. Her program is implemented in 54 schools internationally.

I want to share a little secret,

which I hope will not be a secret
by the end of the talk.

I am truly, madly, deeply passionate
about the human brain.

Science has taught us
that our brain shapes us,

that it makes us uniquely who we are.

And if we think about our brain,
it has 200 billion neurons.

Think about the world's population:
that's a mere 7 billion.

And we have hundreds of trillions
of connections in our brain.

If we imagine all the stars
in the Milky Way Galaxy,

there are more connections in our brain,
than all of those stars combined.

So, this incredibly complex organ
that we carry with us

everywhere we go,
it does shape who we are.

It is a filter,
it filters our perceptions

and our understanding of ourselves,
of others, of our world,

and of our place in that world.

And, what is incredibly amazing

is no two brains are exactly alike.

If you look at the person next to you,

and you note
all the physical differences between you:

the shape of your nose,
the color of your eyes, your height,

there are more differences
between your two brains

than all of those physical differences
in combination.

So, our brain does make us uniquely us.

And I am here today
to share with you my story,

and it's a story of how I came to learn

that not only does our brain shape us,

but that we can actually shape our brain.

My story began in Grade 1,

and in Grade 1 I was identified
as having a mental block.

I was told I had a defect.

And I was told I would never learn
like other children.

And really, the message at that time
was loud and clear.

I was told I needed to learn to live
with those limitations.

And this was 1957, and it was the time
of the unchangeable brain.

And childhood was
a profound struggle for me.

I couldn't tell time.
I couldn't understand the relationship

between an hour hand
and a minute hand on a clock.

I couldn't understand language.
Most of what I read, or heard,

was really as intelligible
as the 'Jabberwocky'.

I could understand concrete things.

If somebody said to me,
"The man is wearing a black coat",

I could paint the picture in my head,
and I could understand that.

But what I couldn't do was understand
concepts, or ideas, or relationships.

So, lots of things were confusing.

I pondered, how could my aunt also
be my mother's sister?

And what did that fraction,
1/4, really mean?

Any kind of abstract concept
was hard for me.

Irony and jokes: that was impossible.

So, I learned to laugh
when other people did.

Cause and effect:
it did not exist in my world.

There were no reasons
behind why things happened.

My world was a series of disconnected
bits and pieces of unrelated fragments.

And eventually,
my fragmented view of the world

ended up causing
a very fragmented sense of myself.

And that wasn't all:
this whole left side of my body

was like an alien being,
unconnected to the rest of me.

I would bang and bump into things
on the left side of my body.

If I picked up anything in this left hand,
I would drop it.

If I put this left hand on the hot burner,
I would feel pain,

but I had no idea
where it was coming from.

I was truly a danger to myself.

My mother, she was convinced
I would be dead by the age of 5.

And then, if that wasn't enough,
I had a spatial problem.

I couldn't imagine
three-dimensional space.

I couldn't create maps in my head.

I would constantly get lost,
even in my friend's house.

Crossing the street instilled terror.

I could not judge
how far away was that car.

Geometry was a nightmare.

I felt incredible shame.

I felt there was something horribly,
horribly wrong with me.

And in my child's mind,
when I'd heard that diagnosis,

of having a mental block,
I actually thought

I had a wooden cube in my head
that made learning difficult.

And I didn't have a piece of wood
in my head, but I wasn't far wrong.

I had blockages, as I was later to learn,

in very critical parts of my brain.

And I tried all the traditional approaches,
they were all about compensation,

and about working around the problem,

finding a strength to support a weakness.

They were not about trying to address
the source of the problem,

and they took heroic effort,
and led to rather limited results for me.

Then, Grade 8.

I hit the wall.

I could not imagine
how I could go on to high school,

and handle more complex curriculum.

The only option I could see
was ending my life.

So, I decided to end the pain.

And the next morning, when I woke up
after my failed suicide attempt,

I berated myself for not even being able
to get that right.

So, I soldiered on.

And part of what kept me going was
an attitude that I learned from my father.

He was an inventor, and he was passionate
about the creative process.

He taught me that if there's a problem,
and there's no solution,

you go out and create a solution.

And the other thing he taught me was

that before you can solve a problem,
you have to identify its nature.

So I continued my hunt.
I went on to study psychology,

to try to understand
what was wrong with me,

what was the source of my problem.

And then, in the summer of 1977,
something life-altering happened.

I met a mind like my own,

A Russian soldier, Lev Zasetsky,
the only difference being

his mind was shaped by a bullet,

and mine had been that way since birth.

I met Zasestky on the pages of a book,
'The Man With a Shattered World',

wrtitten by the brilliant Russian
neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria.

As I read Zasetsky's story,

he couldn't tell time,
he described living in a dense fog.

All he got was fragments, bits and pieces.

This man was living my life.

So now, at the age of 25, in 1977,

I knew the source of my problem.

It was a part of my brain, in the left
hemisphere, that wasn't working.

And then I came across the work
of Mark Rosenzweig,

and he showed me a solution.

Rosenzweig was working with rats,

and he found that rats in an enriched
and stimulating environment

were better learners.

And then he went
and looked at their brains:

their brains had changed physiologically
to support that learning.

And this was neuroplasticity in action.

Neuroplasticity, simply put,
the brain's ability to change

physiologically and functionally,
as the result of stimulation.

So now I knew what I had to do.

I had to find a way to work,
to exercise my brain,

to strengthen those weak parts.

And this was the beginning of
my transformation and of my life's work.

And I had to believe that humans must have
at least as much neuroplasticity,

and hopefully more, than rats.

So, I went on to create my first exercise.

And I used clocks, because clocks
are form of relationship,

and I had never been able to tell time.

So I started with the two-handed clock,

to force my brain
to process relationships,

and then I added a third hand,
and then a fourth hand,

because I wanted to make my brain
to work harder, and harder, and harder,

to pull together concepts
and understand their connection.

And about three to four months in,

I knew something significant had changed.

I'd always wanted to read philosophy,
and had never been able to understand it.

And I just happened to have access
to a philosophy library.

So I went in,
and I pulled a book off the shelf,

and I opened it to a page at random,

and I read that page,
and I understood it as I was reading it.

This had never happened in my entire life.

And then I thought, maybe it's a fluke,
maybe that was just an easy book.

So I pulled another book off the shelf,
opened it, read it, and understood it.

And by the time I was finished, I was
surrounded by a pile of a hundred books,

and I had been able to read
and understand each page.

So I knew that something had changed.

(Applause)

Thank you. My experiment had worked.

The human brain was capable of change.

And then I decided to create an exercise

for that alien part of my body,

and for that I knew I had to work
on an area in the right hemisphere,

the somatosensory cortex
that registers sensation.

I created an exercise for that
and I am no longer a danger to myself.

And then I decided, that spatial problem,

because I was really tired
of getting lost,

and so I created
another exercise for that,

and I don't get lost, I can actually
read maps -- I don't like GPS's,

because I like to read maps now,
because I can. (Laughter)

So, I knew now, the brain could change.

I was living proof
of human neuroplasticity.

And what really breaks my heart

is that I still meet people today,

children, individuals, that are struggling
with learning problems,

and they're still being told
what I was told in 1957,

that they need to learn to live
with their limitations,

they don't dare to dream.

And what I learned since 1977,

when I met Zasetsky and Luria,
and Rosenzweig,

is that, yes, our brain does shape us,

it impacts how we can engage,
and participate, and be in the world,

and every single one of us

has our own unique profile
of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

And if there's a limitation,
we don't necessarily have to live with it.

We now know about neuroplasticity,

and we can harness
the brain's changeable characteristics,

to create programs to actually strengthen
and stimulate and change our brain.

And in 1966, Rosenzweig
threw down the gauntlet.

He said, his challenge was:
"Let's take what he'd learned with rats,

and apply it to human learning."

And we need to embrace that challenge,

we need to also challenge
current practices

that are still operating out of
that paradigm of the unchangeable brain.

We need to work together to take
what we know now about neuroplasticity,

and develop programs
that actually shape our brains,

to change the future of learning.

My vision is of a world that we create,

in which no child has to live

with the ongoing struggle and pain
of a learning disability.

My vision is that cognitive exercises
become just a normal part of curriculum.

My vision is that school becomes a place
that we go to strengthen our brain,

to become really efficient
and effective learners,

engaged in a learning process,

where not only, as learners,
can we dare to dream,

but we can realize our dream.

And to me, this is the perfect marriage
between neuroscience and education.

Thank you.

(Applause)