Some of my clients had experienced certain traumas where they had lost their memory and also contracted some ailments. But through the coaching process acknowledged that it was helping them to retrain their brain and use it in a way that helped them enhance cognition. Here are a few of their stories:
Nearly 7 years ago, I suffered a traumatic brain injury, with a post-concussive syndrome (PCS) lasting 18 months. One of the things that was affected was my short-term memory. I could be in the middle of a word, and forget what I wanted to say, not to mention longer sentences or trying to remember what others said. During my PCS, I was reading up on TBIs, recovery time, and ways to work "around" the problem. I couldn't remember anything shortly after, and definitely not the day after. And as researchers say, in order to commit something to our long-term memory, it needs to be processed through our short-term memory first. Since my short-term wasn't working, imagine my surprise when I could remember most of what I read during PCS once the symptoms were gone and my brain was healed. That's over a year later! Which means that all the data went straight into my long-term memory!
Hi, I had a stroke, (front left lob cerebral hemorrhage) I lost my memory, I was 21, I had no insurance so I was given no rehabilitation help, I had a high school and college degree so also hit road blocks when I was relearning and wanted to take ged classes. I never did get to take the ged classes. It took me about 10 years to get to a apparent full recovery. I do agree you have to do the work as I could have gotten disability and lived my whole like on government help and I believe a would have lived the rest of my life about where I was at after a year where all people would think I was just a little off or known as a special person.
I wanted to learn to read again, I had been a large book reader most of my life, I read about 100 pages an hour, I use to take an average 200 page book, read it in about 2 hours and go to bed, to this day I can no longer do this it now takes me about 4 hours, this was very frustrating too me, until I found out the average person can not read even that fast. Reading is where I chose to start my rehabilitation, I started on a second grade book series called sweet valley kids, I thought I needed a series books so that I could have matching stuff like same hangouts and friends and I really think this helped.
I believe I went through about 20 of these and I moved up to sweet valley teens, I went through about a one hundred of those, I did college ones also but by then I was starting to successfully reading a variety of book types so was no longer depended on needing a series to follow the story line. I also started hitting thrift stores and getting school books, I pretty well re did elementary school on my own, I became a parent aid at my kids first grade class, this helped a lot, when I went to school as a kid we learned sight reading, when they found out it didn't work we where never taught grammar, so I did learn this at my kids school. One big part in relearning I found I had to do is also read aloud this helped me remember what I read instead of it just being gone.
I had a degree in electronics and I had done much math learning, but when I re learned I stayed with the basics there as I found in real life that was all I would truly be using. As we age we become someone else, to the people who new me before they can see the strong change in who I was after, but other then that I'm fully recovered. To this day I'm now 54, I do what I call exercising my brain, I still do school books, word games, Facebook games, crafts, I change it up all the time.
Besides studying some other things that helped me find my way, my dad gave me a tape series of mega memory, before I could use any of the techniques, in it I was changed it seamed to open something up and all that Il was doing over night just started working mainly me memory retention and much of my childhood memories started flooding back to me, another was when I would run into a childhood friend this then also flooded memories, I thought that was gone or used up, but about 6 months ago a friend I new in middle school school looked me up on Facebook and new floods of memories came to me. Instead of living my whole life on welfare/disability which I could have, I have now kept my current job 22 yrs - I work in the telecommunications world so kinda but not really what I did college for, but an ever changing field which I think has continued to help exercise my brain.
Just before this job while I was putting myself back through school, I worked delivering the newspaper, another real good brain exercise people start and stop the paper daily so the rout changed daily I think these helped as well. One thing I still do today is about once a year fore several weeks of the year I would go to sleep listening to my mega memory tapes, which I found are now on YouTube, so I thought I would go through other people's memory tapes on YouTube was hoping to get another flood of memories, it has not happened, but this YouTube video came up and I had an incredible want to tell my story, I hope that someone who was where I was at struggling thinking this just can't be done I'm going to be trapped in who I am now gets inspired knowing it can be done it's not over night but can be done to become fully recovered again.
I have a child with severe autism and I am taking a challenge to recover my child's brain nearly completely. The ways to achieve are the challenging physiotherapy exercises, vision therapy and specific educational approaches (language therapy), also not forgetting about healthy food (not gluten casein free but just balanced) and supplementation as well as great relaxation, leisure. We have so much improved but still a lot ahead.
I am really thankful to Dr L. Boyd, she confirms my observations and my own discoveries. She mentions exactly the main principles we use with my child 1. a lot of practice; 2. struggle: for each activity I am thinking how to increase its complexity or in which way to add resistance (every sports person knows how efficient exercises can be if resistance band is used for example). 3 individual approach: in education, learning language we use to build around individual interests but also in parallel trying to expand the interests. Examples: not using flash cards which are commercially available but making own ones instead. They might include favorite cartoon characters. It's not really difficult to download pictures from internet (google) and edit them in Word (no need even to use Photoshop) to make the characters to do an action or placing them above, under, inside outside other objects to learn prepositions.
The 3rd principle is actually related to the 2nd motivation (positive aspect) and also to struggle (negative aspect). I think everyone can learn everything but the challenge (motivation or struggle) has to be selected correctly and individually. Also the 2nd principle is related to the 1st. "A lot of practice" can turn to less practice if the right challenge/struggle/ motivation is included. Also to make brain changes structural sometimes once learned (even if not mastered to the end) activity needs to be dropped for a while and repeated later (in 2 months or so) rather then drilling and drilling until it's fully mastered. It creates a lot faster structural changes in the brain I think. It was true for me and true for my child I think true for everyone. I still believe the principles can be generalized to achieve fast and steady improvements for majority of individuals independent on their genetic predisposition.