New Year, New Brain: 7 Ways Brain Training Can Boost Your Brain Power
At the top of each new year, we focus a lot on setting goals. We start new exercise regimens, make a plan for our finances, set career or academic goals, and even schedule out our vacations for the year.
But how often do you set goals for your brain health?
The beginning of a new year is a great time to consider how you’ll strengthen and support your brain throughout the year. One way to do that is through brain training with LearningRx.
Whether you struggle with a learning disorder, a brain injury, age-related memory loss, or simply need help improving your performance at work or school, brain training can be part of the solution. Let’s take a look at how brain training can boost your brain power through strengthening cognitive skills like memory, attention, processing speed, and more.
What Is Brain Training?
Brain training consists of games and other activities designed to strengthen your cognitive skills: the skills your brain uses to think, learn, pay attention, and remember. It’s like personal training for your mind—but rather than focusing on building physical strength and flexibility, it targets and strengthens the brain’s cognitive skills.
Brain training exercises can also help build fundamental skills needed for reading, writing, and math. It can help you or your child:
- Learn more easily
- Think more quickly
- Overcome learning difficulties, and
- Unlock your brain’s hidden potential
Here’s how it works: by challenging your mind, brain training exercises give your cognitive skills a workout. As it works harder than usual, your brain starts to strengthen existing skills and develop new ones.
At LearningRx, our brain training programs are built on more than 35 years of research, testing, and practice. Key to our programs’ effectiveness are seven factors:
- Individualized training plans
- One-on-one training
- Matching exercises to the learner’s skill level
- Repetition and practice
- Step-by-step progression
- Exercises that challenge multiple skills, and
- Positive reinforcement.
LearningRx’s brain training programs are available to people of all ages: young children developing early learning skills, older students struggling in school, adults experiencing age-related memory loss, kids and adults with learning differences, or anyone who wants to boost their overall cognitive performance.
7 Ways Brain Training Can Boost Your Brain Power
While brain training can help anyone improve their cognitive skills, the students and adults we work with most commonly come to us for help in the following areas.
1. Academic Help
When students are having difficulty in school, the cause is often rooted in weak cognitive skills. Brain training helps students strengthen those skills, build confidence, and rediscover a love of learning.
At LearningRx, we help students become confident, independent learners. Whether your child is struggling with math, reading, test taking, studying, paying attention, or completing homework, there’s a LearningRx brain training program tailor-made for them.
2. Memory Loss
The brain has the capacity to continue learning and growing well into old age. But just as you need regular physical exercise to keep your body strong, you need to actively work to strengthen your memory and related cognitive skills like attention and processing speed.
LearningRx’s brain training programs target short- and long-term memory, and have improved memory skills for thousands of clients. In one research study, adults over 50 with memory problems improved both short- and long-term memory after completing a brain training program. In the same study, over 90% of clients reported real-life improvements as a result of training!
While brain training isn’t a treatment or cure for age-related memory loss, it can support and improve your memory as you age.
3. Dyslexia and Reading Disorders
Dyslexia is a reading disorder affecting the language center of the brain. For people with dyslexia, speech sounds and decoding are a challenge. Dyslexia is typically rooted in weak auditory processing skills, which can be improved through brain training.
At LearningRx, we have helped thousands of kids, teens, and adults with dyslexia and other reading disorders. While brain training isn’t a cure for dyslexia, it can help people with dyslexia become stronger readers.
Between 2010 and 2018, we provided dyslexia help to more than 2,200 school-aged learners. After brain training, these students improved their learning and thinking skills by 3.6 years on average. Even more impressive, the average student improved by 5.7 years in auditory processing!
4. ADHD
ADHD makes it difficult to focus, control impulses, and stay organized. This can significantly affect learning and work. Brain training helps people with ADHD by boosting their memory, processing speed, attention, and other cognitive skills.
Past LearningRx clients with ADHD have seen cognitive skills improvements across the board, including an average gain of 3.2 years in sustained attention skills. Our clients have also reported significant improvements in other areas, including relationships with friends and family, oppositional behavior, and self-esteem.
5. Autism Spectrum
People on the autism spectrum can experience struggles with social interactions, speech and nonverbal communication, and sometimes restricted or repetitive behaviors. While brain training isn’t a treatment for autism, it can support those on the spectrum by strengthening long-term memory, auditory processing, and broad attention skills.
LearningRx’s brain training programs have helped both kids and adults on the autism spectrum. Between 2010 and 2021, kids and teens with an ASD diagnosis improved learning and thinking skills by 3.2 years on average through brain training! Adult clients with autism made similar across-the-board gains in cognitive skills during the same period.
6. Speech and Language Disorders
Most children can comprehend and speak their native language by the time they turn five years old. But some struggle to master language in those early years and present with a speech or language disorder.
Brain training targets the underlying cognitive skills linked to speech and language. While brain training isn’t a treatment or cure for speech and language disorders, it can help build new skills in people with these conditions.
Between 2010 and 2018, more than 2,000 children and teens with speech and language difficulties completed LearningRx brain training programs. These clients improved their learning and thinking skills by 3.0 years on average, including a gain of 4.1 years in auditory processing skills—the root cause of most speech and language difficulties.
7. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
Brain injuries can cause temporary or permanent damage, affecting the brain’s abilities in multiple ways. When clients come to us with a TBI, we first need to determine which part of the brain has been affected. Then we can create an individual brain training plan that focuses on the related cognitive skills.
Brain training won’t cure a brain injury, but it can strengthen cognitive skills like memory and attention and help improve confidence. Between 2010 and 2018, more than 350 clients with brain injuries received help through LearningRx. The average client saw significant improvements in all of the cognitive skills targeted by brain training.
Click here to hear one client’s story of his remarkable comeback from a brain injury.
Could you or your child benefit from brain training? Take our free brain quiz to determine if brain training is the right fit for you. Then contact us to get started with a brain training program personalized to meet your needs.
