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7 Keys for Brain Repair
1.Environment
A stress and interference free enviroment is to the mending brain what the cast is to the fractured leg or what the band-aid is to the paper cut.
If there is only one thing you should take from reading this page is that:
The brain grows when it is doing nothing!
Of course, if you do nothing all day, the brain will not be challenged at all and will have no reason to grow. On the other end of the spectrum, with some people, if all you did was to stop the constant barrage of requests, challenges and reprimands, you would very likely see improvement connected to the fact that the person can finally relax and develop naturally.
With Multi-Sensory Therapy, you will get what we believe is the optimal balance between prompting growth and letting the growth happen naturally.
For any program or therapy to bring results you need pleasure, novelty and repetition. Multi-Sensory Therapy will give you or your loved one exactly that.
We believe that pleasure is the best way to make the brain want to do anything. Pleasure with Multi-Sensory Therapy consists of stimulating the healthy areas of the brain in a way that activates the brain's natural reward system principally controlled by dopamine, one of the many brain chemicals.
Novelty with Multi-Sensory Therapy consists of presenting the brain with activities or experiences that it is not familiar with, such as associating smell with letters for example, or such as balancing on one foot with a blindfold and arms extended forward in "zombie" position.
Repetition with Multi-Sensory Therapy means twice a day. Not more, not less.
Occasionally we will ask you to have your loved one smell every two hours for example. These protocols are designed to do nothing more than help maintain an optimal chemistry in order to facilitate the heavy work that growth is for the brain. There is no challenge involved.
Stress, our number one enemy
Stress is such a wide-ranging topic and it is not possible for me to cover it all in this section. Let me say for the purposes of explaining that we need to remove it that it does the following to the brain:
- Stress monopolises brain functions, making it difficult to re-arrange its structure to learn or to repair itself;
- Depletes levels of brain Serotonin, which among many other roles, acts as a growth factor for nerve cells;
- Leads to a diminished hippocampus, one of the main hubs through which all information must pass and be processed.
- Leads to liver failure, diabetes type 2, renal failure, stunted growth, all very undesirable side-effects of not monitoring carefully one's environment and stress levels.
In order for Multi-Sensory Therapy to work, all we really need you to do is do what parents already are doing instinctively. We just need you to be even more careful that your loved one's brain is not being bombarded with information, requests or challenges that he/she does not understand and/or which could unsettle him/her.
This is especially true of persons who have been affected from birth with some for of brain-related challenge. The infant with developmental disabilities is affected by stress almost from birth because his sensory translation is inappropriate, and stress burns out connections in the hippocampus in a time when there should be only growth.
No pain no gain. Wrong!
It's easy to understand that pain or discomfort would monopolise brain function, but where we have to disagree with some therapists is where they would recommend protocols that would require that the brain activate areas that are dysfunctional such as teaching a child highly abstract concepts such as mathematics or reading when the child has poor mental image, or protocols that would deprive the brain of essential nutrients.
Eliminate interferences
Stress is one type of interference. Another way to interfere with the brain's efforts to re-arrange the way it is working as a positive response to the environment is to interrupt the process with activities that require the brain to focus its attention on a specific, challenging task.
The activities that we will give you to do with your loved one will only be triggers.
If the brain is free of stress or urgent matters to deal with, it will respond to these activities or games by re-arranging the way it works in order to be able to better take advantage of the experience. The process thus triggered takes 3-5 hours to complete, generally.
During this 3-5 hours period, give your loved one as much down time as you can manage.
Any activity that anyone does with him/her with an agenda will in effect require his/her brain to switch its attention to what you would like him/her to do instead of relaxing and repairing itself.
You already know that the brain, and the rest of the body, does some maintenance work during sleep. It's the same here.
To refer back to the cast analogy, Multi-Sensory Therapy will take care of the brain's self-repair and you will need to take care that nothing interferes with it, similarly to the way a cast protects the fractured leg while it repairs itself, and similarly to the way a band-aid protects the skin while it repairs itself.