A study shows that a company in California helped gray matter to grow in the brains of children who had dyslexia. This is a rather astounding claim. The study says that this occurred after the children in the study went through the company’s intensive learning program. This is the first time that a learning program has produced this kind of result.
It seems a little bit “out there”, but, a company that is located in San Luis Obispo, California, says that their program has helped children who are dyslexic to actually grow more gray matter in their brains. The company is called Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes. It seems that this company has achieved this surprising result simply by exposing children who had dyslexia to their reading intervention program.
The study was preformed by researchers from the Center for the Study of Learning, which is located in Georgetown University Medical Center, and with researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. The study involved eleven children, all of whom had dyslexia. The kids got intensive instruction in reading and spelling from the Lindamood-Bell Seeing Stars program.
Dyslexia is a learning disability. It affects as many as 12% of school aged children. The disability tends to cause people who have it to have problems decoding words, recognizing words, and spelling words correctly.
Other studies indicate that part of this difficulty comes from the way dyslexic brains process speech and attach meaning to smaller parts of speech. This can explain why children who have dyslexia have a tendency to use incorrect words, instead of the word they really meant to use, when they are speaking.
In this new study, the children finished the intensive reading and spelling instruction program. Then, they spent eight weeks without any instruction being given to them. A brain scan, an MRI, was preformed on each of the children in the study at that time.
The brain scans showed “increases in gray matter volume in areas of the brain that are known to play a part in learning and visual imagery.” Researchers also found that the children’s reading behaviors had improved.
The purpose of the study was to find to see if researchers could find a neural basis that could be connected to successful reading intervention programs. Perhaps this study found it with the intensive reading program from Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes. This could, potentially, lead to using their system in schools, with students who have dyslexia.
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