Instead of finding such a school, I took her to Bob Doman, and we embarked on a series of exercises to normalize her brain functioning. I did this with my daughter after I had been told that she needed to go to a special school for learning disability. If you want to augment your children’s brain power, do the exercises with them on a daily basis. If you practice sequential processing every day for three months, you will notice substantial changes in your cognitive abilities. (A powerful enactment of the experience and debilitating effects of having no short-term memory was depicted in one of my favorite movies, the powerful and poignant film, “Memento.”) We can’t make change with money - or be able to think through any other math problem - unless we can sequentially process. Without sequential processing we are unable to draw a map from memory of the United States we are unable to visualize our home when we are in a store intending to buy home furnishings. Without sequential processing, we cannot construct or comprehend complex sentences we can’t remember baseball scores from the beginning to the end of the game we can’t remember the plot of a novel, nor recipes we can’t tell jokes (or if we do, we forget the punchline), nor sing a song or play a musical instrument. As children, we needed sequential processing to learn the various steps of tying our own shoelaces. Yet, when we grasp the importance of sequential processing - the foundation of practically every intellectual, cognitive and psychological function in the brain - we understand that we use it in practically everything we do, in all of our everyday activities. It may be difficult, at first, to understand how remembering strings of meaningless numbers can have such a profound effect on the brain’s overall functioning - and on so many aspects of our lives that we don’t even normally associate with intelligence. He explains that they can take an advanced course in astrophysics, or molecular biology, or whatever and say, “Wow. at Columbia University in biological mathematics.ĭoman laughs when he talks about his clients who have been able to raise their performance to a level 13 - repeating back 13 items. At 14, this girl’s neurological functioning had developed to the point that she was able to attend a local community college, and at 16, a four-year college. Sequential processing exercises was a major tool in Doman’s efforts toward the activation and normalization of this damaged brain, as it is in all of the programs he gives to his clients. Through diligence and hard work by the parents putting the infant, and then child she became, through the paces of targeted exercises, the child’s brain was able to build new neuronal pathways that compensated for the extreme damage. Through a series of assessment tests, Bob was able to understand precisely how this infant’s mind worked (and didn’t work), and specifically how to best impart information to it. The parents contacted Bob when their infant was only a month old. One client he worked with was born with severe brain damage and with an Apgar rating of 1 (the lowest rating of health that a newborn can have). Not to overstate Doman’s success, but in thousands of cases, he has changed cognitive functioning from severe dysfunctionality to normal and superior functioning. He has worked with over 30,000 people running the whole gamut of classifications - from the severely brain injured, to normal and gifted as well. The finding suggests that when you increase digit span, you increase brain functionality on many other levels.ĭoman has been training individuals to have greater digit-span capability for over 30 years. Make note: These children got no extra remedial work in reading or math, yet their test scores showed improvement far beyond a normal expectation of advancement from typical classroom learning. Within an eight-month time period, test scores (as measured by state mandated tests) increased at a level of approximately 2.9 years in reading recognition, 3.0 years in reading comprehension and 1.67 years in math computation. Finally, researcher and clinician Bob Doman decided to train people to increase their ability to do digit span.Ī research study conducted by Doman in 2002 used exercises to help school children in Louisiana to increase their digit span. Even though there is a mountain of research on sequential processing, and its usefulness as a measure of intelligence, for decades no one had thought to bring the research to the next logical level - to actually change peoples’ digit-span level.
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