Special Report: The Interactive Metronome (IM) and ADHD

National Time Management Month is celebrated during February each year. February is the perfect month to focus on time management skills with your clients. Time management is not as complex or difficult as it seems. When children learn time management early in life, they tend to do so for the rest of their lives. Time management in students helps them achieve their academic and recreational goals. It also teaches them to be independent and productive.

Children diagnosed with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often have difficulty staying on task and staying organized, all of which can make time management challenging. This is because of the way the brain tends to process things when a person is living with ADHD.

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“Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think”

Your brain is an incredibly fast, effective and efficient machine that makes about 10,402,560,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per day if everything is running smoothly. That also leaves a lot of room for error. So how does that three pound fat ball on your shoulders control all of that information? Read more to find out about brain communication and information processing.

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Not Just Brain Training

Brain health and neuroplasticity have become all the rage. Lumosity commercials are a mainstay on cable television, often interrupting tv shows like Brain Games. There is no end to the options when it comes to brain training, but do any of these programs work? Scientist say yes, but there could be a catch. Read more to find out how IM’s unique and patented system challenges thinking and movement simultaneously, leading to long lasting improvements in functional brain networks.

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The Ability to Synchronize Motor Movements to a Steady Beat is Linked to a Person’s Ability to Process Speech & Language and Read

A new study by Tierney & Kraus (2013) from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory helps shed more light on why synchronizing motor movements to a steady beat results in faster, more accurate auditory processing, reading, and language processing.  Their landmark study of 124 high school students highlights a neural structure called the inferior colliculus (IC) that serves as a way station for timing information between subcortical auditory structures, cerebral cortex, and the cerebellum. Tierny & Kraus have found the “first evidence linking [motor] beat synchronization ability to individual differences in auditory system function.” Continue reading for more information on this groundbreaking research.

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Individualized IM “on-demand focus” training

As summarized in prior posts, neurocognitive research suggests that the predominant gear of our minds transmission is neutral.  Our mental engine is working (idling) but to those observing us, our brain is not moving—we often do not appear cognitively engaged in any complex thinking or processing.

The typical person spends up to half their time engaged in the spontaneous chasing of miscellaneous thoughts down various rabbit holes of our minds.  Our thought promiscuous mind wanders here-and-there when daydreaming (“zoning out”) or becoming trapped in a cycle of negative unchecked thoughts (e.g., rumination over negative unhappy thoughts; mania; obsessions).

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RAPT: Attention and focus

  I have been reading Winfred Gallagher’s 2009 book “RAPT:  Attention and the focused life.”  In many of my blog posts I maintain that Interactive Metronome (IM) training requires controlled attention—focus.  I have further suggested that “on demand focus” is a potentially powerful tool.  By this I mean one wants to...

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