Functional Neurology

A new name for IM training, at least functionally this is what is happening during IM training. If you watch this trailer, you will see one of the therapies being used is indeed IM. A must see video for all my parents.

Hope Restored: Functional Neurology Serves Humanity from Unseen Line Films on Vimeo.

Brain Balance

Dr. Melillo has recently published an excellent book called Disconnected Kids.  His website  has a couple of wonderful videos on the right side of his website. I strongly encourage parents to make an effort to watch the second one, Dr. Melillo on Everyday with Marcus and Lisa.  Dr. Melillo covers key aspects of brain imbalance on this video.  As you watch the first video, KCAL9 Features Brain Balance,  you will notice that part of the brain balance program seems to implement Interactive Metronome.  At IM Focused, brain balance has for years been a focus of  IM training in addition to connecting various pathways and improving the timing and synchrony of the neuronal activity in each pathway.

Dyslexia - left hemisphere connectivity issue

"Vanderbilt University researchers Sheryl Rimrodt and Laurie Cutting and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and Kennedy Krieger Institute used an emerging MRI technique, called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to discover evidence linking dyslexia to structural differences in an important bundle of white matter in the left-hemisphere language network.

Research from 1951 suspected children with dyslexia had a poorer sense of rhythm.

Read Dr. McGrew's recent post about reading/dyslexia and it's relationship to timing here.

Re-wiring the Brain - It's possible!

Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist specializing in neuroplasticity discusses the cause and cure for children with language  delays. Most children with learning impairments have a brain that has specialized for "noisy" speech. The brain processes in a defective form because early in life the process was noisy. Causes vary from noisy environments, to ear infections, to a 'noisy' brain. That is, a brain that has different time concepts and different space concepts!

Dyslexia Link

As many as 15% of our children may have some form of dyslexia. Visit here to view the warning signs and find more information.

UC Davis MIND Institutes Toxicology Conference

This is not an IM post but a potential reason WHY we are needing so much IM. Click here to watch Dr.Stuart Freedenfeld, M   as he speaks in VERY people friendly terms in his presentation, Defending Your Child From a Toxic World. "The brain is particularly sensitive to toxic exposures during development.

Lanuage disorders are slowed auditory processing - A Matter of TIME!

Paula Tallal from Rutgers University gives this great presentation on how timing is essential for language processing."Language impaired children have difficulty in both receiving and producing brief, rapidly successive signals, specifically in the tens of millisecond time range."

Abnormal Connectivity for Dyslexia

Recently I have read several researchers who are calling autism a connectivity disorder. This NIH reasearch paper, Dec 2008, expresses that Dyslexia is a connectivity disorder as well. 

This study shows that with in a very short time, you can change the functional connectivity of the brain impacting how the brain preforms.  A quote: "fMRI functional connectivity may provide additional information about the temporal coordination of brain regions during specific tasks." Temporal Coordination - I believe this to mean  syncronized timing between brain regions. That's what IM does, synchronizes timing between various regions of the brain.