I met again with the psychology prof who has helped me discover more pieces to my reading puzzle as I work to unravel why I have so much trouble reading after brain injury. To recap: I have a diffuse injury, and so many areas involved in reading were damaged. But some areas were not. My…
Tag: Learning Disability
Reading Rehab Experiment: Reading a Wordless Graphic Novel
The psychology prof I meet with occasionally to discuss reading suggested an experiment: read a wordless graphic novel. He loaned me Cinema Panopticum by Thomas Ott. We had been discussing how the brain takes in information one word at a time and then processes the same bits of information but combined in another area. The…
Everyone on the Same Reading Rehab Page: Finally!
This floating piece of metal is huge. It dwarfs the Redpath sugar plant, which is no tiny building but itself an edifice on the waterfront where people gather to work and play, enjoy life. As it is with that ship, so it is with reading. Reading is a huge cognitive process, a monolithic problem that’s…
Alpha Waves, the Creating Waves of the Brain
I first heard about alpha waves during a sleep study I underwent many, many years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much about them other than they were intruding into my sleep. That sleep problem eventually resolved itself, and I thought no more of alpha waves until the day of my closed head injury. As…
e-Rehab: Organizing Good Lives for Those with Brain Injury
E-Rehab. I’d never heard of it before this week, yet it makes so much sense. At last, I thought, two people in the health care community are acting on the fact that those with brain injuries need lifelong support around things like scheduling and organizing, long after they’ve left rehab and active treatment. Although I…
Attention, Attention, We’re Talking Attention and Traumatic Brain Injury
OK folks, pay attention, it’s attention lesson time. I know, I know you go through life not having to worry about such a thing, unless you have ADD or a screaming baby. But when life smacks you across the head, ringing your brain, it becomes über important to you and those around you because it’s…
Assessment at the ADD Centre: The First Step to Treating Brain Injury
Last time, I wrote about how I found the ADD Centre and what it did for me in treating my brain injury. But I didn’t get into the nitty gritty details of how the assessment and treatment goes. So here’s a rundown of the first step: assessment. Dr. Lynda Thompson, the Director of the ADD…
The Toronto Catholic Board Ponders Axing The Arrowsmith Program
One of the things I found incomprehensible was why the medical model of brain injury rehab insisted on compensating strategies to cope with cognitive deficits over trying to treat the brain itself. First off, compensating strategies are piss poor ways to overcome the problems of deficits in the higher cognitive skills like reading; and second…