Learning Gym Press


Daily Breeze
February 24, 1999
By Lisa Cooke Staff Writer
Andrea Roth Staff Photographer

Exercising the Brain

The Learning Gym's 'fitness for the mind' challenges kids to develop new solutions

Zachary Karli, 7, left, jumps on a trampoline and follows the arm patterns of a chart on the wall, under the direction of psychologist Valerie Maxwell, who has brought the Learning Gym to Peninsula Montessori School.

Playgrounds and after-school sports may keep young bodies in shape, but outside the classroom, where can children exercise their minds?

A new kind of workout can be found at The Learning Gym, where young minds are trained by a combination of physical activities and visual, perceptual and auditory exercises.

Learning Gym workouts are being touted as beneficial to children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (with and without hyperactivity) and other learning disabilities.

"The inability to learn Is a treatable condition, but it is only treatable with a systematic approach," says Valerie Maxwell, a Manhattan Beach psychologist specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of ADD.

Maxwell has joined forces with educator Claudia Krikorian at Peninsula Montessori, ophthalmologist John Funnell of Manhattan Vision, and Manhattan Beach-based family therapist Scott Wilson in promoting The Learning Gym as a comprehensive learning program.

"We call it 'fitness for the mind,'" Maxwell Says. "What we are doing is teaching the brain to work efficiently by integrating the senses."

The course of treatment, which runs an average of two sessions a weak for six months, is based on testing as well as parent and teacher assessment of the child's learning habits. Students are then assigned repetitions of exercises designed to challenge the way they process and assimilate information.

"At a young age, kids are able to make adjustments very easily and quickly" Maxwell says. "Plus, the exercises are fun, so they like doing them."

In fact, a quick glance around The Learning Gym at Peninsula Montessori and visitors might mistake it for a playroom. There are trampolines, balance boards and walking beams. Soft white balls are suspended from the ceiling and piles of gray been bags are at the ready.

But these aren't toys in the regular sense. Each piece of equipment is part of an exercise that serves as a diversion to disengage the brain from its regular mode of thinking. Think of it as a more complex version of patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, then reversing the motions on cue, all while taking in information from a third source.

Guided by therapists Corie Hickson and David Garcia, both therapists trained by Maxwell, students are led through 50-minute sessions of hand-eye coordination and left-brain/right-brain drills.

"Cognitive efficiency depends upon sensory integration," Maxwell says. "And let's face it, kids are hit with a lot more sensory experiences than ever before."

For the brain to process cognitive information, that data must reach the brain in an accurate manner. This is not possible, says Maxwell, when the various sensory systems are providing conflicting information.

For individuals with ADD this is a real problem.

According to M. Susan Roberts and Gerald J. Jansen in their book, Living with ADD, support for the neurological basis of ADD has only been accepted for about a decade. Whereas once ADD was erroneously believed to be the result of high-sugar diets, excessive exposure to TV or inattentive parenting, brain-based studies have found the disorder to be biological.

In fact, using another brain-scan technique, psychiatrist Daniel Amen recently discovered that the ADD sufferer's brain functions normally until it tries to concentrate.

"The miraculous thing about the brain is that it has the ability to compensate for its weak areas," says Maxwell, who says an estimated 50 to 80 percent of children with ADD have a learning disability. "With training, those areas can become just as strong as the strong areas."

The Learning Gym is based on the philosophy that each person learns differently. The theory is called Structure of Intellect (SOI) and was first developed during World War II as an alternative to IQ testing by USC psychologist J.P. Guilford.

Here, Maxwell's involvement with SOI takes a personal turn.

Maxwell's mother, Mary Meeker, was a student of Guilford's. He encouraged the Manhattan Beach educator to further develop the SOI theory.

With her husband, Robert, Meeker developed the SOI Model for Learning, a system that works from the promise that each person has a learning preference: figural, symbolic or semantic.

For example, figural learners process information best through images, such as an illustration of five houses to relate the idea of "five."

Semantic learners prefer to process information verbally with the word "five" either spelled out or spoken.

Symbolic learners would best understand the idea by seeing the numeric symbol "5".

Maxwell believes the key to increasing intelligence then is to strengthen the individual's less preferred modes of learning.

"Through focused exercises, we isolate the area of the learning disability and offer games and exercises that strengthen the weak areas," Maxwell explains.

This kind of learning therapy is Ideal for children and adults with ADD.

"With ADD kids, it's like their brains have just one avenue of solving a problem," Maxwell says.

"With Learning Gym exercises, we are able to distract the brain from following the same path and challenge the mind to develop new solutions."

The term "attention deficit disorder" is often a misnomer.

In many cases, a person with ADD is able to attend to a task for long periods of time.

"ADDers even have the special ability to hyperfocus" Maxwell says.

"They can concentrate with complete and satisfied absorption when the task is novel and interesting to them."

The problems come in regulating energy levels and attention.

While drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin, the most prescribed medications for ADD, can prove effective in balancing the whirlwind of hyperactivity and impulsive behavior, Maxwell admits the drugs have side effects.

"Our goal is to taper the drug part of the ADD therapy down to the smallest amount possible," she says.

"For the best results, there have to be adjustments in diet and exercise as well."

And for relearning the learning process, there is The Learning Gym.

"Even kids without serious learning problems are completely engrossed by the exercises," says Krikorian of the Montessori Learning Gym facility.

"It's hard to get them to stop when their time is up."

Feedback from the school's teachers has been overwhelmingly positive.

"For teachers, who are the harshest critics of all, to be reporting great results in the classroom, something must be working," says Krikorian.




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