Brain Exercises > Eaton Brain Improvement Centre (EBIC)

EBIC offers a wide range of cognitive brain exercises. There is no other program for adults and older adults with such comprehensive options. These exercises were developed at Arrowsmith School® in Toronto which has used this program successfully since 1978. These exercises focus on specific brain functions that are responsible for memory, reasoning, planning, organization, processing, listening, social perception and number efficiency (mental math ability). The following is the name for each Arrowsmith Program® brain exercise offered at EBIC and what functions they address in the human brain:

Symbol Relations
Symbolic Thinking
Symbol Recognition
Memory for Information and Instructions
Predicative Speech
Artifactual Thinking
Object Recognition
Supplementary Motor
Motor Symbol Sequencing
Kinesthetic Perception

Symbol Relations Exercise

This exercise improves the adult or older adults ability to quickly see relationships between ideas or concepts. Problems in this area are displayed in the following ways:

1. For most adults or older adults this usually showed up in childhood when learning to tell time on an analog clock. There could be confusion reading the hour hand or misreading the minute hand.
2. Also, one could experience difficulty with understanding math concepts. The person can learn math procedures but has no idea of the meaning or "why" of the procedure. Mathematics is mechanical or procedural rather than conceptual.
3. It is also apparent that the adult or older adult can have trouble understanding cause and effect relationships or the reasons why events happen. This is another sign that the Symbol Relations exercise could be beneficial for that individual. Trouble understanding cause and effect relationships has implications for learning new skills, working at a job and in understanding social situations.
4. It is also evident that some people with weak Symbol Relations often need to read material over and over again, but is never certain as to whether he has understood what is being said. As well, the person has great difficulty figuring out word problems such as "Sally is shorter than Jane who is taller than Mary. Who is tallest?" because he can't see the relationships.
5. In addition, the person sits in on workshops or lectures and is not able to comment on the points being made because he does not fully grasp the meaning at that moment. After he leaves the seminar he plays the ideas over inside his head, comes to understand what was said and then is ready to comment but the situation is no longer available. This is a very frustrating experience. This can also happen in a discussion in a social situation. More importantly, the person can't grasp the logical inconsistencies in what somebody is saying, which may leave him prey to destructive friendships or con artists.
6. There is often personality rigidity or stubbornness associated with this learning weakness because the person has difficulty considering several alternatives logically at the same time in order to plan and make decisions. Once the person has made up his mind it is very hard for it to be changed because he has so much trouble holding two or more alternatives in his head simultaneously while also looking at the advantages and disadvantages of each. He can't see the relationships between two or more positions.
7. The individual often has trouble understanding and communicating his own thoughts and feelings to others due to this problem. This can lead to feelings of anger and frustration on the one hand and helplessness, alienation and depression on the other.
8. The most salient feature is a sense of uncertainty - of never being able to verify meaning but only guess. There is a general difficulty in interpreting the meaning of any symbolic information whether spoken or written and the person is left with a constant sense of uncertainty as to whether he has correctly grasped the meaning intended.

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Symbolic Thinking Exercise

The symbolic thinking capacity is responsible for developing and maintaining plans and strategies for action through the use of language. It is the capacity for mental initiative in symbolic tasks. Problems in this capacity are reflected in the following ways:

1. The person has trouble keeping his attention focused on a language related task to completion. The person is easily distracted from a task and frequently labeled as having a short attention span. The person cannot maintain the focus of his attention in a job or social situation. The person cannot work out an active plan to organize himself, resulting in disorganized behaviour. There is a central lack of self-directed organization.
2. The person is not self-correcting of his mistakes and is frequently unaware that he has made mistakes. The person has difficulty learning from his mistakes due to this lack of awareness. Along with this there is a general lack of worry or concern about his performance.
3. At a milder level of impairment the person can worry to some extent about something but does not pull in all the facts and keeps hammering away at one or two things until becoming distracted again. After it has been pointed out, the person becomes aware of the foolishness of his behavior, but can't work out strategies to prevent it from happening again.
4. The person cannot work out long term goals and plans for himself. He tends to respond to the immediate situation in a 'live for the moment' fashion. Other people may view him as untrustworthy or flighty because of the lack of stability in long range planning.
5. The person's choice of friends may be based on how 'fun' they are with no consideration of the long term consequences of the friendship.
6. If a person does not know the answer to a question immediately he will leave the question. There is no process of active probing or searching for the answer, no mental initiative. The person is mentally passive.
7. There is a difficulty in seeing the main point or overall idea of a symbolic activity (e.g., a discussion, a story, a movie, a math question) and a tendency to get sidetracked by irrelevant details.
   
8. The person fails to take into account all the existing elements in a situation before acting and therefore behavior is inappropriate to the specific situation; he cannot look before he leaps.
   
9. The person reduces a situation to a stereotype of an already known situation so that there is a lack of differentiation between situations and a response that is appropriate in one situation is applied in another where it is not appropriate. For example, the person may think that a strategy developed by a character in a television program is an appropriate strategy to deal with a real life situation.

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Symbol Recognition
 
This is the capacity to recognize and remember a word or symbol visually that has been seen before. The following problems occur when this capacity is weak:

1. The person has to study a word many more times than average before they can visually memorize the word and thus recognize it and say it correctly the next time he sees it. The person literally does not recognize the word "house" as the same word they have seen before. As a result, learning to read and spell words is a slow process. A person with this problem has trouble visually recognizing their spelling errors.
2. The person's word recognition level (i.e., words they can see and say immediately) is low.
3. Reading speed is slow because the person has to rely on sounding out words that they should be able to recognize.
4. The person has great difficulty visually memorizing symbol patterns in mathematics (e.g., patterns in algebra) or in chemistry (e.g., chemical equations).

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Memory for Information and Instructions

This is the capacity for remembering chunks of information such as instructions. A weakness in this capacity results in the following symptoms.

1. There is difficulty remembering verbal information or instructions. The person has trouble remembering and therefore following lectures or extended conversations or instructions. Instructions often have to be repeated several times before the person is certain of what he is supposed to do, and this certainty doesn't last. The person is often aware that he has forgotten and is too embarrassed to ask again, after having had it explained so many times, and may decide to 'muddle through'. One example is not being able to follow a radio program because the person could not remember enough of the information as he was listening. When he improved on this capacity he was able to follow the radio to the point that he even won a radio contest. This can also happen when watching TV or a movie - the person can't remember parts of the newscast or movie.
2. People with very poor memory for instructions/information tend to smile a great deal and not participate in any conversation or discussion because they can't remember enough of the information to follow. They also tend to tune out in lectures, conversations and job situations because they get tired due to the extra effort required to retain the information.
3. When a person with this dysfunction tries to learn something new there is a gradual degradation of the information he is trying to memorize. The person may memorize information for a job, finding it hard initially, and he may have to go over it 10 times, but he feels that he knows a fair amount of the information by the end of studying. An hour later he's got 3/4 of it, a couple of hours later he's got about 1/2 and by the time he writes the exam for his job he is in trouble.
4. Another sign for this problem is difficulty remembering lyrics in a song.
5. One man who flies an airplane has trouble remembering the information from the tower (fortunately it is repeated several times) and reported some near misses due to this problem. This same man would be sent out to the grocery store with a verbal list of 4 or more items and would invariably forget several items.
6. People with this problem tend to compensate by taking notes in order to help them remember information or by developing rigid habits without which their lives would fall apart.

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Predicative Speech

This is the capacity for the sense of how symbols (words and numbers) interconnect sequentially into fluent sentences and procedures. This occurs in thinking, speech and writing. The following are examples of problems caused by weaker functioning in this capacity.

1. The ability to rehearse and recode information and actions through speech inside one's head (internal speech) is impaired. In any learning situation this impairs the person from being able to actively recode information through internal speech in order to retain the information solidly in memory. Thus the information that can be memorized immediately breaks down over time with a significant loss in long term retention due to an inability to recode the information. In other words, the person may show an inability to recapitulate or 'put things in his own words'.
2. The person tends to have stereotypic speech (e.g., a store of memorized or cliched phrases) because he has trouble elaborating or extending speech. The person tends to speak in short sentences. Written expression is similar. The person does not have a sense of the appropriateness of where words go positionally in a sentence. The sentences used often are incomplete and do not make sense even when complete, e.g., "I would ask a loan for the bank."
3. There is difficulty in following long sentences.
4. The person lacks tact in what he says and may appear to be rude because there is a failure of active internal mental rehearsal of what he is going to say and what the consequences of this would be. An example: a girl receives a cassette of a rock group for a birthday present and hands the tape back to the giver saying "I don't like this group".
5. Procedures in mathematics can be learned with some extra effort but there is a breakdown of the steps of the procedure over a relatively short time. A common example is that the steps in a long division question fall apart.
6. The person does not work out inside his head using internal speech the significance and consequences of doing something before acting so behavior can appear impulsive or ill considered.
7. The person has very limited ability to say things to himself inside his head to control his behavior. He cannot go through a process of active internal rehearsal of what he should do in various situations. He may feel 'parachuted' into an experience and not be able to develop an effective response to his environment.
8. The "ASK BEFORE YOU DO" syndrome: Loved ones report that their family member tries to be helpful and goes ahead and does something without asking before he does it. The person is not capable of thinking out the possible consequences of the action beforehand.

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Artifactual Thinking

This capacity is necessary for the coordination, modulation and interpretation of emotions. The following problems occur when this capacity is impaired:

1. The person has difficulty registering and interpreting his own emotions. The person's emotions are less refined and less differentiated. The person's capacity for being emotionally reactive or responsive is impaired.
2. The person cannot interpret non-verbal information such as facial expressions and body language and as a result he can't change his behavior according to the signals people are sending him. For example, the person cannot read his boss so he is unaware of whether the boss thinks he is doing a good job or not. Similarly, the person is unable to interpret a teacher's reactions which can interfere with the learning process. Also the person does not always act appropriately in social situations because he does not perceive the significance of the non-verbal information.
3. The person tends to talk about something excessively, and does not pick up the cues that other people are not interested in listening and want him to stop.
4. The person has trouble resisting impulses and can become dominated by them. One example is excessive impulse buying.
5. There is a lack of anticipatory planning and of developing long term strategies to deal with situations.
6. The person does not get worried in situations when he should.
7. There is a failure of active surveying of visual details to get the overall picture of a situation. The person prematurely stops looking before taking in all the visual information and hence comes to the wrong conclusion about the situation.

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Object Recognition

This is the capacity for recognizing and remembering the details of visual objects. A weakness in this capacity is indicated by the following characteristics:

1. A person with this problem takes longer to visually recognize and locate objects that he is looking for. There is difficulty finding items when shopping. The person walks by an item several times before he recognizes it. The person also has trouble locating something in a refrigerator.
2. A manager of a drugstore with this problem had great difficulty learning to recognize his products and to remember their locations in the store.
3. The person has trouble remembering visual cues (such as landmarks) that help in the process of remembering the location of places.
4. The person has trouble recognizing and remembering faces and will miss details in facial expressions, both of which cause social and interpersonal problems.
5. The person has trouble remembering the visual details of pictures.

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Supplementary Motor

A problem in this area impairs a person from carrying out internal sequential mental operations such as doing mathematics inside his head.

1. The person can be so impaired that simple counting processes break down.
2. The person has difficulty calculating change at a store.
3. The person has trouble adding up the numbers in a series of playing cards for games such as Bridge.
4. If this dysfunction is at a moderate level of severity it means that the person is unable to sufficiently hold numbers inside his head to stably learn the addition and multiplication tables. The person cannot make progress in mathematics beyond a grade 4 level. The person resorts to finger or stick counting when solving math questions.
5. If the problem is less severe the person may be able to eventually learn his math tables but since he cannot do even relatively simple mental operations he cannot carry out the more difficult aspects of dealing with fractions at a grade 4 to 6 level.
6. Anyone interested in a career involving mathematics requires the supplementary motor capacity for mental operations at an above average level to succeed.

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Motor Symbol Sequencing

This capacity is involved in the process of learning and consistently producing a sequential symbolic motor pattern. When there is a weakness in this capacity, all sequential symbolic processes involving input through the eye (e.g. reading), output through the hand (e.g. writing) and mouth (e.g. speaking) are impaired. The following are some features of this problem.

1. Some adults misread words due to poorly developed patterns of eye fixations. For example, the person reads "step hall" for a road sign that actually says "steep hill". A truck driver may misread road signs or bills of lading, causing him/her to take a much longer time to perform his job despite having superior intelligence.
2. Handwriting is messy and irregular. People with this dysfunction would rather print than handwrite.
3. Writing is not automatic. The person has to concentrate on the process of writing and as a result has less attention to focus on the content of what is being written. Slow writing speed also results.
4. Copying material from one location to another (i.e. from the whiteboard or a textbook into a notebook) is slow and often inaccurate. People that perform clerical work often find it painful and tedious and as a result, will have a tendency to put it off.
5. Spelling is poor. For example, the person may spell the same word several different ways on the same page.
6. The person tends to ramble and has difficulty getting to the point. There is a tendency to leave out chunks of information which are necessary for the listener to understand what the person is talking about. The person has this information in his head and thinks he has said it but it does not get expressed in speech. It is difficult to get ideas out in the order of their importance in speech, and the person may go back and forth over several subjects, making his speech difficult for others to follow.
7. Mathematics - This problem affects accuracy in mathematical computations. The person makes what appears to be careless errors but which are really motor slips. For example, the person thinks of one number in his head and unintentionally writes down a different number.

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Kinesthetic Perception

This is the capacity for perception of where both sides of the body are in space.

1. The person has limited awareness of where one or both sides of his body are in space. He has a tendency to bump into objects, doorways, etc. with the affected side of the body.
2. When driving a car, the person is not equally aware of both sides of the car. This can result in scratching the car more frequently on one side, taking corners too wide and/or driving too close to either the right or left side of the road.
3. The person is less aware of where his/her hands and fingers are when cutting with a knife or using tools; consequently, injuries may result more often than normal.
4. If the problem is severe the person may hurt himself/herself on the impaired side and be less aware of where the pain is coming from.
5. If the problem occurs in the writing hand uneven pressure results, causing the person to wander on and off the line when writing.
6. In more severe cases there is an inability to recognize objects through the sense of touch. A person cannot distinguish between keys or anything lighter when feeling his/her pocket.
7. There may be some degree of awkwardness in body movement.
8. There is also less articulated mouth movement which can result in speech slurring.

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