A glimmer of hope ...

In May of this year, a good friend emailed me referring me to a recorded Radio National radio interview with Barbara Arrowsmith Young , thinking that there might be something in it that could help A-One. I had heard about Barbara because she was 'Chapter 2' in Norman Doidge's book The Brain that Changes Itself about the neuroplasticity of the brain. At the time I had thought there may be something in this to help A-One, but daily life and work commitments took over at the time.

When I listened to Barbara's interview, she said something that made me sit up and take notice: she had had difficulty reading analogue clocks. I knew someone else who had difficulty with that: A-One was fine with digital clocks, but he always needed to check if he was reading analogue clocks correctly.

I started to look into this further. I emailed the Arrowsmith School in Canada. At the time I asked whether they have anything available online, or even better whether they were collaborating with any games developers. Imagine the possibilities if brain training was built into highly addictive games like World of Warcraft! All those despairing parents of especially teenage boys who spend hours and hours playing games - what if all that game playing could improve their brains!

As it turned out, the Arrowsmith school does not have an online offering, but they sent me their Principal's pack. As I read through it, I mentally checked off the list of impairments for which they have developed exercises: A-One's OK at that, OK at that, OK at that, THAT'S A-One!, OK at that, OK at that, THAT's A-One! From my mother's inexpert eye (I'm not a professional educator or psychologist - my background is in ICT), it sure seemed to me that here were some exercises that could help A-One. And the Arrowsmith school has been using brain training to help people with cognitive impairments for 30 years!

At the same time, members of my husband's family had been reading Barbara's book The Woman who Changed Her Brain and in knowing A-One, had also thought that there could be something in this that could help him. As I read the book myself, I thought this is the closest thing to A-One I'd ever read, and seemed to fit him more than any of the therapies that we had done with him in his early life.

Barbara's writing was inspirational and brought me to a deeper level of compassion and insight for my son.



I sensed that the planets were aligning. Fairly recently, the opportunity arose for me to cease full-time employment (at least for a while), so I am about to embark on a program of brain training with A-One, and to assist in whatever way I can to make brain training more accessible in Brisbane to help people with cognitive impairments.