When students struggle to learn even with adequate instruction, the best explanation is that the underlying brain skills responsible for processing academic material are not strong enough, nor are they automatic. This is referred to as a processing deficit.

 

In order to help students with learning or processing deficits, or specific learning disorders, some of the more crucial processing/brain skills including attention, memory, auditory and visual processing, and processing speed have to be strengthened considerably and made automatic for the student to learn efficiently.

 

Making brain skills automatic means shifting them into the sub-conscious where everything occurs with little mental effort. A fluent reader for example doesn’t have to consciously sound out the individual sounds of every word; they simply look at the word and automatically know how to pronounce it. Making processing skills automatic is crucial because when academic tasks such as reading or math require too much conscious resources to complete, other relevant areas such as comprehension also suffer. Similarly, when academic tasks require little conscious effort, the excess conscious energy is available for higher-order tasks such as comprehension and reasoning.

 

Making processing skills automatic involves a very precise and distinct strategy. Through a process we call “loading,” the student is required to do an increasing number of processing tasks at once. If the child is able to do two tasks at the same time, a third is added. If he or she is able to do three tasks simultaneously, a fourth is added. Since the conscious mind can only handle a limited number of tasks at a time, the others are forced to the subconscious, which is exactly where you want most processing skills to be so that they are quick, efficient, and automatic.

 

LIFT Brain Training for Processing improves concentration, memory, visualization, integration, auditory processing, and processing speed, and makes them all become more automatic, and that makes learning easier, faster, and more enjoyable.