“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
Chinese Proverb
Our brains start to develop before we are born, creating neurons, the cells in the brain that communicate through connections called synapses. It is estimated that we have about 250 million neurons in our brains at birth. Those neurons then start to form connections as we interact with our environment. In childhood, the brain strengthens connections that are used a lot (for example to understand the sounds of language spoken around us), and prunes infrequently used connections. This makes the brain more efficient and effective in its processing, in response to the demands of the world around us.
Some skills or activities are easier to learn when we are young, such as sign and hearing, or learning a language. But it is also the case that many skills can be developed -- improved or strengthened -- over a lifetime. Recent research has shown that the brain's frontal lobes (the area where most of our higher cognitive processing (thinking, organizing, judging, strategizing, for example) takes place doesn't fully mature until we are close to 30. Even then, the brain still has significantly plasticity. Plasticity is a term that neuroscientists use to refer to the fact that the brain is constantly changing -- creating, strengthening, and pruning synapses to enable us to interact effectively with our environment.
Because every brain is the result of uncountable reactions between us and environments, each brain is self-created and unique. While the parts of our brains specialize in certain kinds of tasks, we acquire skills to greater or lesser degrees. That means that each individual is likely to have some strong areas and some weaker areas among all the mental processes that make up our cognitive functioning.
Over the last 60 years or so, our understanding of hour our brains develop the basic mental processes we need to be successful in school and work and life has increased dramatically. We know much more about how to improve lesser developed cognitive skills, enhance how our cognitive process work together, and increase overall mental functioning.
BrainWare Safari and Children's Cognitive Development
BrainWare Safari has been show to improve cognitive skills for children ages 6 and up, including children who are normally developing, those with learning issues, and those identified as gifted. In published research, children aged 6 to 13 who used BrainWare Safari improved both their cognitive abilities and their performance on academic achievement tests significantly more than a control group who simply followed their normal routine.
In addition to the significant cognitive growth that drives greater academic success, parents and teachers of children who use BrainWare Safari typically see improvements in a a variety of observable behaviors, such as:
