The last word 36 How to rewire a brain Barbara Arrowsmith-Young overcame the odds to change her life – and along the way helped thousands of others. By Janet Hawley If it wasn’t for a Russian soldier living with a bullet lodged in his brain, and then a cage of playful rats, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young would not have become the woman who changed her own brain. Nor would she have helped almost 4,000 learning-disabled children and young adults change their brains, too. At the Toronto headquarters of her schools – think brain gymnasiums – Arrowsmith-Young reflects that fate and serendipity can entwine in the weirdest ways to nudge scientific breakthroughs. Dr Norman Doidge, the noted Canadian psychiatrist and author of the best-selling The Brain That Changes Itself, calls ArrowsmithYoung’s personal journey “truly heroic” and puts her work “on a par with the achievements of Helen Keller”. In a foreword to Arrowsmith-Young’s autobiography, The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, published by HarperCollins in May, Doidge calls her “a bold and ingenious woman… Rarely is the person who makes the discovery the one with the defect. Barbara is an exception.” international students attending the Eaton Arrowsmith School in Vancouver. The mother of a 17-year-old, who recently returned to Sydney, emailed me a two-page list of therapies her daughter had undertaken for ten years, adding, “It all paled into insignificance compared with what Arrowsmith achieved in five months.” Her daughter, who last year could barely achieve 50% in exams, “just achieved 95% in advanced English and 80% in chemistry in her first two HSC assessments”. Arrowsmith-Young cautions: “We can’t help everyone; our program can’t help intellectually disabled or autistic children. In some students the turnaround is dramatic, within a year, but most require three to four years.” At 26, Arrowsmith-Young read a diary written by a Russian soldier, shot in the brain in 1943, in which he recorded his subsequent disabilities. “It was like meeting my twin soul,” she remarks. “The damage that a bullet had done to Lieutenant Lyova Zazetsky at age 23, I was given at birth.” The next year, she learnt of an experiment at the University of California, Berkeley. “A cage of rats given an enriched environment, with running wheels and a playground of toys, grew larger brains than rats kept in a sterile cage. It was my eureka moment. I decided if rats could grow their brain capacity bigger and smarter, so could I,” she says with a defiant grin. “I imagined my own impaired brain as a muscle, and invented stimulating exercises to target weak areas that didn’t work correctly. I repeated exercises over and over, 12 to 14 hours daily, increasing the degree of difficulty and complexity month after month. Yes, it was obsessive.” Arrowsmith-Young explains the difference in her approach: “The traditional way to help children with learning disabilities is to avoid the areas of weakness and work around them; provide compensations like extra time in exams, or simplify their curriculum. These coping techniques often continue right through school, like crutches. “The Arrowsmith way is to target the weak areas of the brain and strengthen them. Different exercises strengthen different cognitive functions. Once the brain is woken up, it doesn’t revert – it stays in its new, changed form.” After more than six months, dormant parts of her brain began stirring awake. Suddenly she could function like a normal person. “It felt like stepping out of a terrible fog into total clarity,” she says. Without realising it, Arrowsmith-Young was utilising the principles of neuroplasticity at the same time that scientists were only beginning experiments in the field. Previously, science had contended that the brain is hard-wired at birth. This view of the unchangeable brain has since been overturned by clinical trials that show mental exercise and experience can alter its structure. Today, a steady stream of apparently bright kids, who also suffer severe learning difficulties, attend the 34 schools in Canada and the US offering the program. Nine Australian children are among several THE WEEK 30 March-5 April 2012 To an outsider the exercises seem slightly bizarre. I watch students intently clicking away at computer screens with ten-handed clocks. Others are memorising a sequence of shapes, then spotting those shapes amid a maze of figures on a screen. In the next classroom, students sit like pirates with a patch over one eye, tracing Hindu script, thus forcing the weaker side of the brain to work. It makes sense when you think of it as physiotherapy for the brain, strengthening weak areas through repetitive exercise, massaging stiff lesions and increasing flexibility. Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born in Peterborough, Ontario, to a high-achieving family. Her father, P IERRE G AU TR EAU, EATON E DUCATION Typically, the children who can be helped are of average or above-average intelligence but have various puzzling blocks that leave them unable to grasp how to read or write fluently, or do maths, or focus on tasks. They can’t see relationships between facts, reason logically or understand abstract concepts. Typically, Arrowsmith-Young (below) is an elegant woman of 60 who moves too, parents have spent fortunes exhausting every avenue – gracefully, radiating warmth and good humour. It’s a world away medical and psychological checks; dietary tests; speech, ear, eye from the frighteningly confused, therapists; tutors. Parents tormented loner she was until describe family heartache, “It was my eureka moment. I decided if rats watching once-happy kids age 26. She was born with an could grow their brain capacity bigger asymmetrical brain – half her develop low self-esteem, anxiety faculties brilliant, half severely and behavioural problems as and smarter, so could I” disabled – but her near-genius they slide behind their peer half was unable to control her group. Tantrums, explosions at other half, which was a stumbling, mumbling, unfocused dolt. homework time, and despair are common. No matter how hard “I grew up regarded as a version of an idiot savant,” she says. they try, they just can’t “get it”. Often they have been wrongly “I could parrot the 6pm news verbatim at 11pm, but not diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and understand what a word of it meant.” prescribed medication. The last word 37 Jack Young, was an engineer and inventor. In 1994 both the marriage and business Her mother, Mary, was a teacher and partnership with Cohen ended, but nutritionist. “No one knows why I was Arrowsmith-Young soldiered on solo. born with a damaged brain,” she says. In 2001 she met Doidge, who became “Perhaps I suffered a stroke at birth, as impressed with the enhanced outcomes of I had no awareness or control of the left her students. Doidge has called her “an side of my body.” As a child, she was a outstanding member of the first generation bewildering mix of extreme capabilities and of neuroplasticians”. He forecasts that great extreme incapacities. “I had a phenomenal advances lie ahead, with neuroplasticity memory. I could recite entire movie scripts being used in stroke recovery, pain manage or lists of facts like a machine, but I had ment and age-related decline. But education no ability to use the information, to authorities have been cautiously slow in process it. I had no concept of humour, adopting Arrowsmith-Young’s techniques. irony, metaphor, sarcasm, conning or The most common concern is that students deceit, so I was unable to understand social Eye exercises targeting the brain’s weaker side already struggling with the curriculum will relation-ships. I’d replay conversations over fall further behind if withdrawn from it to and again, trying to grasp what was meant.” attend an Arrowsmith program. It requires a leap of faith to commit to a short-term strategy, hoping for long-term gain. Desperately wanting to please her parents, Barbara memorised schoolwork, going over it multiple times. “It was like trying Deborah Thompson, a Toronto financial analyst who sent her to catch a beam of light,” she says. “If an exam was fact-based son, Sam, to Arrowsmith, said, “People told my husband and me I’d get 100%, but if it required reasoning I’d fail dismally. we were destroying Sam’s life, that we might as well be throwing Teachers couldn’t understand how I could be so bright yet so chicken bones on the floor and doing voodoo. But Sam was seven stupid.” She had few friends and her self-esteem plummeted. and reading was torture for him. He had significant problems; he “My beloved cat, Star, was my best friend. I’d pour out my couldn’t get his words out. We knew there were pathways in his misery to him.” brain, but the metaphor I use is that it took Arrowsmith to sweep the snow off the pathways.” Sam returned to regular school after Moving into senior school, her disabilities became more obvious. three years at Arrowsmith. Now 19, he is a voracious reader and “Studying was like swimming through quicksand. I’d go down to lucid talker and is studying business administration at university. the basement and pound my head against the dryer.” Scraping into the University of Guelph in Ontario, she began a Bachelor of Devorah Garland, a tall, blonde, confident Canadian journalist, Applied Science in Child Studies, hoping to better understand her was a member of that first class in the inaugural 1978 program. condition. Serendipity finally arrived. A handsome PhD student “I owe my life to Barbara,” she declares. “When I finished school named Joshua Cohen gave her a book written by the Russian I was an educational failure, with such low self-regard that I could neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria, The Man with a Shattered only think of using my looks to become a prostitute or marry a World: The History of a Brain Wound. Luria did an enormous sugar daddy.” A counsellor suggested she enrol in the program. “I amount of research on brains (he had many wounded Russian couldn’t process information, I had no idea what humour was, my soldiers to work on) and intricately mapped the regions respons vision was two-dimensional, so the world looked like cardboard ible for various functions. The more Arrowsmith-Young read, the cutouts. Within a year, Barbara fixed my brain. I could reason and more her intuitive light bulbs flashed. “The bullet had lodged in see in perspective. I began to get humour – hey, I could actually his left occipital-temporal-parietal region, which integrates signals tell a joke!” She set a new career course, studying journalism. from the lobes responsible for vision, sound, language and touch. Now I knew what part of my brain was blocked.” Doidge considers learning disorders to be one of the most underestimated underlying causes of failure at school and in life. “It Then she read about the rats exercising their way to bigger brains, wrenches my heart to think of all the children, sitting in schools and devised her first cognitive exercise. Never able to tell the time, throughout the world, wiring into their brains each day the idea she created hundreds of flashcards with clock hands, and for 12 that they are dumb or useless or losers, because many educators hours a day compelled herself to recognise the relationship between are still under the sway of the doctrine of the unchanging brain.” the two hands. Six months “finally activated the moribund part of my brain, getting the neurons to fire in order to forge new neural I put it to Arrowsmith-Young that her life sounds a bit like pathways”. She devised further exercises and fairly soon, she says, Sleeping Beauty waking up after being kissed by the Prince. all her functions unfogged. With her new clarity, she completed “Yes,” she replies with a soft laugh, “but I was my own prince.” a master’s degree in psychology. She also married Cohen and in 1978 they began teaching the program before, in 1980, setting Barbara Arrowsmith-Young will appear at the Sydney Writers’ up their first school in Toronto with eight students. Festival in May. This article first appeared in Good Weekend. WEATHER For the week that was: Warmest: 37°C at Bradshaw, NT, on 27 March Wettest: 342.2mm at Daradgee, Qld, on 26 March ● ● ● Sunniest: 11.5 hours at Alice Springs, NT, on 23 March ● Coldest: -4°C at Perisher Valley, NSW, on 25 March La Niña – the principle cause of eastern Australia’s wet summer – has officially ended. The ocean and weather conditions in the Pacific are returning to normal, meaning the climate should be near average over the next few months. In Tasmania, a cold front that swept through south-east Australia reduced Butlers Gorge to just 2°C – its coldest March day in 55 years. Additionally, Hobart had its coldest March day (12°C) since 1957. Meanwhile, Central Australia experienced its biggest earthquake in 15 years. Measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, the epicentre was near Ernabella, in South Australia’s far north on Saturday, but nobody was hurt. A magnitude-7.1 quake also struck near Talca in central Chile, about 250km south-west of Santiago on Sunday. No deaths have been reported, though residents were left shaken. On Monday, the temperature at Cromdale in Moray, Scotland, reached a record-breaking 23.3°C. Statistics supplied by weatherzone (www.weatherzone.com.au) 30 March-5 April 2012 THE WEEK