How It Works
Just Like Physical Exercise, Brain Fitness Improves with:
Frequency and Intensity
To drive neuroplastic changes, we must provide learning opportunities that are consistent, frequent and intense in terms of the amount of time and the amount of focused attention required of the brain.
Adaptation to the Individual Learner Needs
Let’s start with an example from physical fitness. If your trainer starts you with weights that are so heavy that you can lift them at all, you will never strengthen your muscles because you will not have any success. So it is with learning. To keep an individual learner motivated and successfully learning, we must create an optimal learning environment that allows the child to succeed and not become too frustrated. The brain is processing information at its own speed, memory capacity and attention capacity and to drive changes in these basic capacities, we need to do it individually and adaptively.
Simultaneous Development of Key Cognitive Skills
When a group of neurons fire nearly simultaneously, this tells the brain that all of the information it just experienced goes together. The information then becomes “wired” together in the brain. So it is important to train the brain on several cognitive skills at once so that the brain learns patterns over time and can be more effective and efficient.
Timely Motivation
To drive and develop brain fitness and plasticity it is important that the child be motivated and it is crucial that the motivation be timely. They need feedback that they got an answer correct quickly to facilitate faster learning. The more they are engaged and motivated, the more they will be attending. All this needs to be timely to generate that moment of change in neurons when the brain is actually learning.
We know that learning is more engaging and interesting when the challenge and problems that the learner confronts are within their reach, but not too easy. And we know that we need to create circumstances in which the learner has a good chance of succeeding a fair amount of the time.
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