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Children & Teenagers
Learning & Performance Enhancement
Academic - Learning involves a complex choreography of neurochemistry and neurology. Memory alone requires us to input, store, retrieve, and organize information. Each of these involves different brain chemistries and brain areas. Because we understanding this process, we are able to help students learn faster, understand more, and test dramatically better. Combined with being able to remember and organize information, knowing how to focus attention and get back on track quickly when faced with distractions are among the most important skills a student can develop. Dr. Ennen has worked with children from a wide range of capabilities, from kids with Down's Syndrome, Autism, Aspergers and ADHD to normotypical and exceptional achievers.
Athletic - Sports require timing and focus, motor control and coordination, quick mental processing speed.
Focus is the ability to block out distractions and keep your mind in the game. With the noise and excitement of cheerleaders and crowds, or simply the distraction of competing thoughts and concerns, being able to keep your head "in the zone" can make the difference between success and failure.
Mental processing speed is a measure of how fast you can make sense out of a large amount of information. Faster is definitely better. As an example, it takes less than half a second after a pitcher lets go of a baseball for it to cross the plate. In that time, the batter has to figure out what kind of pitch is being thrown, decide where it will cross the plate, whether it will be a ball or strike, whether to swing at it, if so then where in the field to hit the ball to and what part of the bat to hit it with. Then they need to actually perform on those decisions. That is a lot of information to process quickly. The speed with which one analyzes and organizes that information determines how much time is left to act on it and, ultimately, the outcome of that action.
Motor control and coordination are the result of our body knowing where it is in time and space and the muscles getting the messages correctly to respond appropriately. Not only does this have a lot to do with mental processing speed as just explained, but also with binding the action of the sensory brain oscillators which tell us where we are with the motor brain oscillators which control our musculoskeletal responses. Since thinking is actually a motor activity, at least neurologically, this also plays directly into our mental abilities.
Social - Social skills begin with social cue-ing, the ability to pick up signals that tell us what is happening in the social setting.
The most important of these are visual signals, one of the main reasons why we are taught to look a person in the eye when speaking to them. Children and adults who have difficulty picking up these cues generally have a difficult time in social events because they are essentially flying blind.
They can't tell whether their behavior and messages are met with interest or concern or apathy or distaste. Because of this, they have trouble knowing when they are perceived as inappropriate and adjusting their behavior.
The process of social cueing primarily takes place in a part of the right brain called the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPF). The DLPF is also central in most executive or goal-directed behaviors involved in learning and activities of daily living.
By activating the DLPF and other brain areas as needed and relieving the impediments to the dormant parts of the brain being "woken up", we can significantly increase the ability to understand and take part more fully and easily in social situations.
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