Snowdrop and 'The Listening Programme.'

Snowdrop is pleased to announce that in conjunction with US neurotechnology company ‘Advanced Brain Technologies,’ we are now able to offer our clients ‘The Listening Programme.’ (TLP).

The Listening Programme is a music listening therapy which provides engaging brain stimulation to help ameliorate a range of problems which our children face.

Systematic training is provided through listening to psychoacoustically modified classical music which trains the brain to process sound more efficiently. This can lead to improvements in:

• Learning
• Attention
• Communication
• Reading

• Listening
• Sensory Processing
• Social Engagement
• Behaviour

• Self Regulation
• Musical Ability 

Children, teens and adults can use the programme in the home, classroom or workplace. Completely portable and easy to use, The Listening Programme fits easily into anyone's schedule and only requires 15 to 30 minutes of daily listening.

The Listening Programme is a fusion of beautiful art and sound science. The masterful performances of the award-winning players of the Arcangelos Chamber Ensemble are skillfully crafted using advanced audio technologies to provide an unrivalled listening experience.

How can something that seems so simple - listening to psychoacoustically modified classical music - actually impact a wide range of abilities, such as sensory processing, reading, communication, learning and memory?

Numerous studies worldwide, including research at the University of Sheffield, provide empirical evidence that substantiate The Listening Programme’s efficacy and credibility.

The Listening Programme’s psychoacoustically modified music and production techniques are designed to stimulate or “exercise” the different functions of the auditory processing system. This enables the brain to better receive, process, store and utilise the valuable information provided through the varied soundscapes in our lives such as music, language and the environment in which we live.

THE EAR BRAIN CONNECTION

So the question becomes...how can we overcome auditory processing challenges - moving from a “disorganised” to an “organised” system?

Certain classical music, like that of Mozart, Haydn and Vivaldi, has specific structure, producing sound waves in organized patterns. Within these patterns are vital elements including time, frequency and volume. When listening to music, the ear is receiving the musical sound waves - waves that arrive in different frequencies, measured in Hertz (Hz). These frequencies stimulate the brain, and thus affect different functions of the mind and body.

SPECIFIC FREQUENCIES FOR SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS

The Listening Programme combines decades of clinical research in several fields, including neurology, physiology, psycho-acoustics, auditory processing, music theory and more. The method builds on the work of respected leaders in these fields, such as ear, nose and throat (ENT) physician Alfred A. Tomatis, M.D. (1920-2001). Among other discoveries, Dr. Tomatis helped identify the relationship between certain sound frequencies and their effect on their functions of the mind and body. A simplified explanation of Dr. Tomatis' findings shows that certain brands, or zones, of sound frequencies affect different abilities.

TLP is designed to address these zones, systematically providing auditory stimulation that, when customized for listeners by ABT Providers, can help improve their ability to function in a number of ways.

THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF AUDITORY PROCESSING ARE TRAINED USING THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MUSIC - FREQUENCY, VOLUME AND TIMING.

How much does 'The Listening Programme' cost?

Unfortunately, the cost is out of Snowdrop's control, but anyone who knows me knows that I would not be offering something unless there was evidence to demonstrate it's effectiveness.  That effectiveness has been demonstrated by my own university the University of Sheffield.

The cost of the 10 psychoacoustically modified CD's which make up the programme is £378.  The additional cost of Snowdrop controlling the programme on a fortnightly basis is an additional £15 per fortnightly consultation. 

The Listening Programme for Schools. 

The cost of TLP for use in a school is £600 plus fortnightly monitoring of the programme by Snowdrop at a cost of £50 per fortnightly consultation.

Keane. - A Case Study From the Snowdrop Programme.

Keane had been born with his twin brother prematurely, he had suffered a bleed to the white matter of his brain around the ventricles, commonly known as ‘periventricular leukomalacia.’ His cerebral aqueduct was also blocked which meant that there had been a build up of cerebrospinal fluid which had caused hydrocephalus.  This had created pressure on the brain which had caused further injuries.  A shunt had been successfully inserted to drain the excess fluid, but to top it all, the hospital had allowed infection to seep in and Keane had contracted severe meningitis.  This had caused even more injuries.

When I first saw Keane, he was 8 months old.  I had been contacted by his mother and had made the trip from Devon to London to assess his developmental problems.  I walked through the front door and into the kitchen where Keane was sitting in a baby bouncing chair and simply staring into space, - he was totally disconnected from what was happening around him, - it was as though someone had found his ‘standby’ button and pressed it.  Mum confirmed that he was like this most of the time.

The diagnosis and prognosis given by the medical professionals was dire.  There had been massive damage to the white matter of the brain, to parts of the cortex, (especially the visual cortex, meaning that Keane was cortically blind) and to parts of the upper brainstem.  The forecast was that Keane would be very severely handicapped for the rest of his life and would be totally dependent in every way for every aspect of his care.

I knew we had no time to lose here and set about designing a programme of developmental stimulation there and then in the family’s front room, which I duly taught to them that same afternoon.  The programme was designed to attack Keane’s problems in every area of development and to stimulate and direct the natural plasticity of the brain.  I knew from both mum and dad’s attitude that they would follow the programme unstintingly every day.

Two months later, I received a telephone call from mum telling me that she thought Keane was beginning to see and that he had become much more alert.  Obviously I was pleased, but I persuaded her that it was still ‘early days’ and that we should keep our feet on the ground and just continue with the programme.

The time quickly came for Keane’s four – monthly reassessment and the family had elected to come and see me in Devon.  I was delighted at what I saw when they walked through the door of the village hall where I see my families.  Keane was clearly scanning his environment and actually made eye contact with me.  As I put him through his paces it was clear that we had woken this little boy from his stupor.  He had made significant gains in every area of development.  I designed a new programme and sent the family home.

Three years down the line, and over those months and years I have received several telephone calls from mum.  The first was to tell me that Keane had begun speaking and that one of his first words was a very well known expletive!  Wonder where he got that one from, - any ideas dad?  The next was to tell me that not only was Keane now walking but that they couldn’t shut him up and he was driving them potty!  Good old Keane.  Recent phone calls complain of him placing himself on the naughty stair after purposefully being naughty and getting into a fight with another child at a family wedding after a child made impolite reference to his red hair.  Mum often makes him talk to me on the phone himself to explain his escapades. 

Keane is now developmentally superior to his twin brother in every area.  It has been a long journey for the family, who have dragged their son out of the depth of his disabilities by working relentlessly every day for three years.  The programme is relentless and is repetitive, but it shows what it is possible to achieve. 

Keane starts at school next year, but it won’t be the special school that everyone expected, - it will be at a mainstream school with his twin brother.  He is now described as ‘precociously intelligent.’  His doctors are amazed and have no explanation for his recovery.  The main thing is that he has his life back.  Instead of what would have been a life of suffering and problems he has a life of hope and opportunity.  That is how powerful brain plasticity can be.

Anyone who would like more information about the Snowdrop programme should go to our website at http://www.snowdrop.cc  or email us at snowdrop_cdc@btinternet.com or you can call for a chat on 01884 38447

Can how a baby cries predict his or her future language skills?

Thanks for this piece of wisdom, which reminds me of the first question on the Snowdrop language development profile.  "Did your child have differentiated cries in response to his / her varying needs?"

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According to a Japanese proverb: “A crying child thrives.” A recent studythat examines the complexity of an infant’s cries in relation to his or her language development seems to offer a scientific basis for this folk wisdom.

For babies whose cries exhibited complex melodies by the age of two months, the study, published in the The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal, says the probability of a language delay greatly decreases. Those whose cries were less complex had a greater chance of  language delays by two years.

In addition, the study examined the language development in infants with cleft lip and cleft palate. The findings suggest distinguishing characteristics heard in the cries of those infants with a cleft and those without. This research is important because the findings may offer new treatments to help language development for infants with clefts.

The psychology of crying is nothing new. In study after study, scientists have documented thecatharsis that only a good cry can bring. For infants, crying is the sole form of communication and there are three distinct types: A “basic cry” is a rhythmic pattern consisting of a cry followed by silence; an “anger cry” is similar to a basic cry but with more volume due to the release of excessive air through the infant’s vocal chords; and a “pain cry” is a loud cry followed by periods of breath holding.

Infants also exhibit what is called a “simple cry melody” – a crying arc consisting of a single rise and then a fall. According to researchers, it is the segmentation of these melodies by momentary pauses and respiratory movement that leads to syllable production.

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Tell us something we don't know!!

Time-Lapse Imaging Charts The Change Taking Place In Brain Circuitry During Development

Although it annoys me when people refer to autism as a 'disease,' this research in its references to the effect of environmental inputs upon the developing brain, supports everything we do at Snowdrop when we provide programmes of increased environmental stimulation for children who have neuro-developmental disabilities like cerebral palsy and autism.  With thanks to Medical News Today.


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Dr. Ed Ruthazer is a mapmaker but, his landscape is the developing brain - specifically the neuronal circuitry, which is the network of connections between nerve cells. His research at The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro at McGill University, reveals the brain as a dynamic landscape where connections between nerves are plastic, changing and adapting to the demands of the environment. Dr. Ruthazer is the winner of the inaugural Young Investigator Award from the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, which recognizes outstanding research achievements. His laboratory uses time-lapse imaging to chart the changes that take place in brain circuitry during development in the hope of advancing treatments for injuries to the central nervous system and therapies for developmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. These diseases are widely held to result from errors in brain wiring due to a disruption of the complex interactions between genetic and environmental influences during brain development. 

Astoundingly, nearly one out of every 100 Canadians suffers from one of these disorders, which have been estimated to cost the Canadian economy over $10 billion annually in addition to inflicting a devastating impact on patients and their families. Two of Dr. Ruthazer's recent publications in prominent science journals advance our knowledge of how the brain develops, which is vital to developing advanced therapies, treatments and even early intervention. 

Nature versus nurture 

His new study, published in the prestigious journal Neuron, vividly illustrates the effect of environmental inputs on the developing brain. Exposure to just 20 minutes of intensive visual stimulation during development led to enhanced visual acuity and higher sensitivity to finer and smaller visual targets than non-conditioned controls. 

"There is no room for inaccuracy in the mature brain," says Dr. Ruthazer. In the developing brain, there is an initial overproduction of imprecise connections between nerve cells. During development and learning, these connections are pruned, leaving connections that are stronger and more specific. This refinement occurs in response to inputs from the environment. "Our study shows that intense visual stimulation renders nerve cells more receptive to subsequent learning and refinement." 

Importantly, Dr. Ruthazer's group identified the molecular mechanisms underlying the changes in the nervous system. Environmental stimulation activates the production of a protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, or BDNF, which plays a major role in the plasticity of neurons and has two forms: proBDNF facilitates the weakening of inaccurate or poorly targeted connections and mature BDNF strengthens appropriate, effective connections. In this case, in response to environmental activity, these processes led to refinement of nerve cell connections involved in the visual system and required for visual acuity. "This indicates that sensory experience during development leads to rapid production of key proteins used at nerve cell connections to confer long-term stability and increased efficacy at appropriate connection points, while simultaneously helping to eliminate inappropriate connections." 
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Anyone wanting more information about the Snowdrop programme should email snowdrop_cdc@btinternet.com or visit the Snowdrop website.

Brain Needs Vitamin C to Function

Personally, I think it is just a bit of a 'leap' to assume that just because GABA receptors in the retina function better with high doses of vitamin C, that this automatically applies to the rest of the brain. However, GABA receptors do supply inhibition so it would be interesting to see what effect vitamin C had on some children on the Snowdrop programme.
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Nerve cells in the eye require vitamin C in order to function properly — a surprising discovery that may mean vitamin C is required elsewhere in the brain for its proper functioning, according to a study by scientists at Oregon Health & Science Univ. recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"We found that cells in the retina need to be 'bathed' in relatively high doses of vitamin C, inside and out, to function properly," says Henrique von Gersdorff, a senior scientist at OHSU's Vollum Institute and a co-author of the study. "Because the retina is part of the central nervous system, this suggests there's likely an important role for vitamin C throughout our brains, to a degree we had not realized before."

The brain has special receptors, called GABA-type receptors, that help modulate the rapid communication between cells in the brain. GABA receptors in the brain act as an inhibitory "brake" on excitatory neurons in the brain. The OHSU researchers found that these GABA-type receptors in the retinal cells stopped functioning properly when vitamin C was removed.

Because retinal cells are a kind of very accessible brain cell, it's likely that GABA receptors elsewhere in the brain also require vitamin C to function properly, von Gersdorff says. And because vitamin C is a major natural antioxidant, it may be that it essentially 'preserves' the receptors and cells from premature breakdown, von Gersdorff says.

The function of vitamin C in the brain is not well understood. In fact, when the human body is deprived of vitamin C, the vitamin stays in the brain longer than anyplace else in the body.
"Perhaps the brain is the last place you want to lose vitamin C," von Gersdorff says. The findings also may offer a clue as to why scurvy — which results from a severe lack of vitamin C — acts the way it does, von Gersdorff says. One of the common symptoms of scurvy is depression, and that may come from the lack of vitamin C in the brain.

The findings could have implications for other diseases, like glaucoma and epilepsy. Both conditions are caused by the dysfunction of nerve cells in the retina and brain that become over excited in part because GABA receptors may not be functioning properly.

"For example, maybe a vitamin C-rich diet could be neuroprotective for the retina — for people who are especially prone to glaucoma," von Gersdorff says. "This is speculative and there is much to learn. But this research provides some important insights and will lead to the generation of new hypotheses and potential treatment strategies."

Source: Oregon Health and Science Univ.

Memories Are More Likely To Stick If Learning Includes Regular Periods Of Rest

More evidence to support the way in which we deliver the Snowdrop programme; - That it should not be an intensive, concentrated programme of developmental activities, but should be spaced out during the day and incorporated into a more general 'lifestyle pattern.'

With thanks to MNT for highlighting this research.
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Scientists and educators alike have long known that cramming is not an effective way to remember things. With their latest findings, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, studying eye movement response in trained mice, have elucidated the neurological mechanism explaining why this is so. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, their results suggest that protein synthesis in the cerebellum plays a key role in memory consolidation, shedding light on the fundamental neurological processes governing how we remember. 

The "spacing effect", first discovered over a century ago, describes the observation that humans and animals are able to remember things more effectively if learning is distributed over a long period of time rather than performed all at once. The effect is believed to be closely connected to the process of memory consolidation, whereby short-term memories are stabilized into long-term ones, yet the underlying neural mechanism involved has long remained unclear. 

To clarify this mechanism, the researchers developed a technique based around the phenomenon of horizontal optokinetic response (HOKR), a compensatory eye movement which can be used to quantify the effects of motor learning. Studying HOKR in mice, they found that the long-term effects of learning are strongly dependent on whether training is performed all at once ("massed training"), or in spaced intervals ("spaced training"): whereas gains incurred in massed training disappeared within 24 hours, those gained in spaced training were sustained longer. 

Earlier research suggested that this spacing effect is the product of the transfer of the memory trace from the flocculus, a cerebellar cortex region which connects to motor nuclei involved in eye movement, to another brain region known as the vestibular nuclei. To verify this idea, the team administered local anesthetic to the flocculus and studied its effect on learning. While learning gains in mice that had undergone one hour of massed training were eliminated, those in mice that had undergone the same amount of training spaced out over a four hour period were unaffected. 

Explaining this observation, the researchers found that the spacing effect was impaired when mice were infused with anisomycin and actinomycin D, antibioticswhich inhibit protein synthesis. This final discovery suggests that proteins produced during training play a key role in the formation of long-term memories, providing for the first time a neurological explanation for the well-known benefits of spaced learning - as well as a great excuse to take more breaks. 

How Repetition Changes the Structure of the Brain.

The more we repeat something, the better we get at it; this much is uncontroversial.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth examining. The connection between repeating an action or a skill and then improving because of that repetition is a concept that is so natural and intuitive, so well accepted as common knowledge, that we often fail to appreciate the fascinating mechanics behind the process of skill acquisition.  It follows the old adage, 'practice makes perfect!'

On the most basic level, learning a new skill or improving a skill involves changes in the brain.  There are a few different ways that our brains adapt to picking up new skills and changing environmental conditions.  The first involves a rewiring of the networks of neurons in the brain.  Each skill or action that a child performs involves the activation of neural pathways.  In Norman Doidge’s book on neuroplasticity, The Brain That Changes Itself, Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone has a beautiful little analogy for the way that these pathways relate to skilled performance (Page 209):

"The plastic brain is like a snowy hill in winter.  Aspects of that hill–the slope, the rocks, the consistency of the snow–are, like our genes, a given.  When we slide down on a sled, we can steer it and will end up at the bottom of the hill by following a path determined both by how we steer and the characteristics of the hill.  Where exactly we will end up is hard to predict because there are so many factors in play." “But,” Pascual-Leone says, “what will definitely happen the second time you take the slope down is that you will more likely than not find yourself somewhere or another that is related to the path you took the first time.  It won’t be exactly that path, but it will be closer to that one than any other.  And if you spend your entire afternoon sledding down, walking up, sledding down, at the end you will have some paths that have been used a lot, some that have been used very little.”

Every action we perform, every new skill we pick up, involves beating down and refining a kind of neural trail.  We are making real changes in the brain.  And our brains are remarkably efficient to change in response to training.  In one study, video game players who played the dark, fast-moving action-based game Call of Duty for 9 weeks were not only better at the game, but were able to see significantly more shades of gray, post-training, than a group who played a simulation strategy game that did not exercise those skills.

Over a longer time span, it is also possible to see significant structural changes in the brain.  For example, the brain area associated with motor control of the right index finger in blind subjects who are braille readers has been found to be significantly larger than that of sighted individuals.  Similarly, a famous study of london cabbies, famous for their ability to navigate the twisting streets of the city, found that they had greater brain volume in the hippocampus, a structure heavily involved in both memory and spatial navigation, than bus drivers who followed a predefined route every day.

With respect to the brains of children who have developmental disabilities, the brain injuries or abnormalities they suffer might slow that response to training down a little, but the response is still possible.  

Evidence for neuroplasticity abounds, - from the structural differences which have been found between experienced athletes and novices, through to the Chinese study of expert divers which found increased gray matter volume in brain areas associated with skilled motor control.  Along the same lines, an Australian study of skilled racket-sport players found that brain areas associated with the racket arm were larger than in a matched group of non-athletes.  The evidence is irrefutable! 

The overarching theme here is that the brain is malleable–it changes with training.  It is an interesting concept to keep in mind, especially with respect to brain injured children and it is the overarching principle of the Snowdrop programme.  

It’s easy and natural to think about training in terms of muscles, the body and physical skills.  But every new skill that a child learns is accompanied also by neural changes that may be harder to see, but are equally important.

If you would like more information about the Snowdrop programme, just visit our website on http://www.snowdrop.cc  - email us at snowdrop_cdc@btinternet.com or call on 01884 38447