Strengthening Symbolic Thinking also increases the capacity for self-direction and maintaining focus on tasks to completion. It would be reasonable to suggest that in this digital age when it seems we are routinely bombarded by information and stimuli from every angle, the ability to filter out what’s unimportant and remain focused on the task at hand may be more challenging now than ever before.

Developing the brain’s capacity to think selectively and maintain concentration is an invaluable tool for success in education, the workplace, and personal life. A lack of ability to concentrate is often an issue we see with students who may be inaccurately described as having the condition ADD or ADHD. When in fact there is an issue with Working Memory caused by information overload rather than the symptoms of inattention such as distractibility, disorganization, or forgetfulness.

Psychologists describe working memory as a cognitive system with a limited capacity responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing. When a student is diagnosed with a working memory problem then the brain struggles to hold more information than it is able to process. This results in overload and significantly reduced performance.

A seemingly simple task such as solving a word problem requires several processes to work concurrently: eye-tracking, phonemic memory (letter sounds and blends), decoding and encoding, symbol recognition, and reading comprehension. A crucial element of the Arrowsmith Program™ provided at CEC is that we isolate individual cognitive functions such as Symbolic Thinking and work to strengthen them one at a time.

Approaching cognitive functions individually when addressing learning difficulties enables the student to cope with the task they are completing; in which completing the task causes the strengthening of the cognitive function. Strengthening the individual’s cognitive functions in isolation eventually enables the student to use them in conjunction without causing an overload to working memory. The result is an individual with the ability to now learn at the same capacity as their peers and it’s an inspiring experience.

As always, we encourage further discussion and questions from our CEC community and until next time wish you and your families all the best.

Hugo Moore
CEC