February 2008 -- CHB DREAM magazine
Easy listening
Nadine Gaab, PhD, a researcher in Children's Developmental Medicine Center Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, is taking an alternative approach to studying dyslexia by focusing on how children process sounds and investigating whether musical training can improve reading. "It's a very neglected area in research," she says. "Many studies look at dyslexia's connection to the visual system but not the auditory." The idea that some dyslexics could have a problem processing sound was introduced in the 1970s, but it had never been tested using brain imaging. So Gaab decided to use functional MRI (which maps changes in the brain) to examine how the brains of 9- to 12-year-olds with dyslexia responded to sounds, before and after using educational software called Fast ForWord Language.
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February 2008 -- CHB DREAM magazine
From bench to bedside to classroom
Gaab is part of a growing body of scientists who find that neuroscience is sadly estranged from real-life applications and want to bridge this gap. As part of a burgeoning field called neuro-education, Gaab is opening channels of communication between cognitive neuroscience and the education system by taking what she discovers in the lab and bringing it into local classrooms to share with teachers, who can then incorporate her discoveries into their curricula.
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December 2007 -- BrainConnection.com
Sound Training Rewires Dyslexic Children's Brains For Reading
A very recently published brain-imaging study suggests that children with developmental dyslexia struggle with reading because their brains do not process fast-changing sounds properly. Moreover the study found that with the help of computerized sound training, the children with developmental dyslexia were able to literally rewire their brain. This resulted in more accurate sound processing and hence better language and reading.
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