MY | local MICHIGAN PEAK PERFORMANCE The Brain Seeks a Beat By Mary Meldrum D o you want your child to excel in school and in life? Pay attention, parents. Here is the secret … The brain is the most important organ in the body. It starts off listening to a singular rhythmic beat—mom’s beating heart—that sets it on its way to stardom. This initial, perfectly timed repetition of sound impacts a baby’s brain on a profoundly dynamic level. The baby correlates the metronomic beat with security and comfort—two components necessary for an optimized environment for focused learning. After birth, your child’s brain continues to process information in rhythmic beats with an internal clock that keeps time at intervals as small as microseconds. This temporal processing is responsible for focusing and attention, reading comprehension, memory, speech processing, and motor coordination. Although it is difficult to know exactly what causes disorders like ADHD, dyslexia and autism, individuals with these disorders have neural timing deficits related to their internal clock. What if this disruption could be corrected?
Transcript
MY | local
MICHIGAN PEAK PERFORMANCEThe Brain Seeks a Beat By Mary Meldrum
Do you want your child to excel in school and in life? Pay attention, parents. Here
is the secret …
The brain is the most important organ in the body. It starts off listening to a singular rhythmic beat—mom’s beating heart—that sets it on its way to stardom. This initial, perfectly timed repetition of sound impacts a baby’s brain on a profoundly dynamic level. The baby correlates the metronomic beat with security and comfort—two components necessary for an optimized environment for focused learning.
After birth, your child’s brain continues to process information in rhythmic beats with an internal clock that keeps time at intervals as small as microseconds. This temporal processing is responsible for focusing and attention, reading comprehension, memory, speech processing, and motor coordination. Although it is difficult to know exactly what causes disorders like ADHD, dyslexia and autism, individuals with these disorders have neural timing deficits related to their internal clock. What if this disruption could be corrected?
On a related note, everyone has heard that children who take music classes also seem to excel at math. This is more than slightly true. Music class provides students with a singular rhythmic beat that their brains crave in this maddeningly over-amped up world. In this rhythmic musical environment, the brain is naturally comforted and teaches itself how to relax and focus. This carries over into all aspects of a child’s life. Math, reading, writing, and communicating all become easier as the child is able to overcome all stimuli in their world and attend to the one task that is most critical.
A powerful method called interactive metronome (IM) is used by Michigan Peak Performance that takes advantage of the brain’s ability to self-correct through neural plasticity utilizing interactive metronome, helping children to naturally overcome distractions and adjust their neural timing deficits.
Using an auditory/visual platform that has a game-like experience, IM engages the player and promotes synchronized timing to the brain. These exercises become increasingly complex as the player moves through “levels”, requiring higher and faster cognitive processing, attention, and decision-making.
Michigan Peak Performance is a mobile business, visiting clients all over the Metro-Detroit area—from Rochester to Trenton to Ann Arbor—in their homes for an average of 12, one-hour sessions of IM.
The brain seeks a beat for the foundation of focus. The physiology behind this fact is irrefutable. Interactive metronome is the cutting edge of what Stanford and Harvard are doing. Research for the last 25 years using the Woodcock-Johnson test scoring has shown that IM has sustained effective results, with an increase of two years in reading fluency and one year increase in math fluency. That’s huge. Michigan Peak Performance’s CEO, Paul Sikorski has had outstanding results with children.
“Anyone can potentially benefit from IM, but this works best on children 5 to 15 years old,” explains Sikorski, a drummer and a teacher. His clientele includes children with ADHD, autism, students looking to improve test scores—such as on the ACT—and athletes looking to improve their game focus.
Any pediatrician can tell you how predictability, repetition, and schedules are important components to a child’s well-being and stable upbringing. Trust, security, and the ability to relax and focus are all components of survival that are born from rhythmic patterns in a child’s world. The auditory patterns that the brain craves—like the sound of a beating heart—are critical to our ability to decipher information through multiple distractions and learn.
While we can close our eyes to the visual world, short of earplugs, we do not have any way of stopping sound from reaching our brains. Invasive noise bombards our brains nearly every moment after birth. Tapping into the brain’s natural ability to tune out distractions, IM elevates a child’s ability to push aside all the noise in their environment and to find and focus on what is important.
Scientists continue to find that music lessons can produce profound and lasting changes that enhance the general ability to learn. Specifically, it is the counting, the beat, and the metronomic tempo of music that the brain responds to.
“Repeated rhythmic auditory stimulation increases brain growth in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain responsible for executive functioning,” shares Sikorski.
External motivators and medications are temporary. Michigan Peak Performance’s unique IM method captures a person’s intrinsic ability to focus by naturally retraining their brain, and results from IM last.
If you have a child who wants to score higher on the ACT, or who struggles with ADD, ADHD, sequential tasks, needs help focusing on school work, or a student athlete who wishes to take his/her game to the next level, contact Michigan Peak Performance for more information: 313-910-0944.
