The Problems
What did more to kill the Dore Program anyother thing is the length of time it takes for the program to work. A year spent doing exercises for 10 - 20 minutes, twice a day is a massive commitment and this has a significant impact on a wide range of issues.
The first problem is maintaining the parent's and child's motivation in doing the exercises. Unlike a physical exercise program where improvements can be felt and measured in a few weeks, the benefits of a cerebellum program may not be seen for six months or more. It is very hard to stay motivated when for so long there is little to see in return. Dore tried to combat this by requiring people to pay upfront for the entire course on the basis that not wasting £2000 is a big incentive to stay on the program.
The second problem of the treatment's time-scale is cost. The longer it takes the more it costs to provide the treatment. In Dore's case that meant including the cost of ten or so visits into the price.
The next problem is one of ethics as no single treatment works on everyone. Having a child spend a year on the treatment, only to have the treatment fail, means depriving that child of a year when they could of been pursing other treatments.
The final problem caused by the long treatment time is its impact on research. Recruiting subjects for a year-long experiment is hard, the time frame raises the cost of the research and it takes longer to get your results out.
These four consequences of the treatment time frame are problems that WyyMi will face and the only way to combat them is to speed everything up. If we can reduce the treatment time, all these problems are reduced.
How Much Training is Need?
The Dore Program, needed not less than 10 minutes, twice a day for a year: (10 x 2 x 365) / 60 = 121 Hours. That is equivalent to a solid 3 week training course or, to put into an education setting, three to four hours a week over a school year.
Think of skill a skill you don't currently possess. For example, playing an instrument, gardening, a sport or cookery. How good would you be if you went on a three week training course where you learnt that skill for eight hours a day? Or if you did a 3 hour evening class once a week for a school year? After 120 hours of tuition and practice, you could go from knowing nothing to being competent but still be someway off being an expert.
Learning to cook is not exactly comparable to learning balance and coordination and the 120 hours mark is only a rough estimate. However the 120 hour target has a certain amount of common-sense logic to it.
How Fast Can You Learn?
Anyone who has ever been on an intensive training course or has spent hours cramming for exams, will tell you that there is only so much it is possible to absorb at one time. There is no reason to assume that cerebellum training is any different plus there is also the physical effort involved. A week of eight hour days spend doing exercises would be very demanding and a fair amount of that time would be wasted. The flip-side is too infrequent training. With lessons a week or more apart, there is fair amount of time spent going over old material.
Clearly there is an optimal frequency and duration for training. This is (I believe) an area that has a fair amount of research on it. Most it, I suspect, will apply to learning academic skills such as a foreign language but the basic principals should carry over to cerebellum training. The neurons in the cerebellum work in exactly the same way as the neurons in the frontal lobes.
What little I know this area is that a pattern of reinforcement is necessary, e.g. learn the material one day and then spend half-as-much time again reviewing it the next day, then review it again after a week and again after a month. A major advantage WyyMi will have over Dore is that the WyyMi software will know exactly when an exercise was done and can therefore schedule the repeat sessions at the optimum time.
Making It Fun
When people are having fun, they remember more. In stressful situations, people remember less. Consequently if a parent is having to force a child to do the exercises, the amount learnt is going to be less, the whole training program will take longer and there is a greater chance that the family will drop out. A software based program has great potential for incorporating fun elements such as graphics and sounds into it. It can also allow the user some choice in their exercises which is important because having even a small amount of control over a situation has a significant effect on reducing stress.
These elements combined will hopefully make the children want to do the exercises and even do them in their spare time. Thus increasing the speed at which the program is completed.
Faster, Better, Cheaper
I think that the optimum cerebellum training will involve one to two hours a day, assuming the child is motivated. This would mean that the training course can be completed in two to four months. This is based on the idea that the software will be intelligent enough to monitor the child's progress and pick the type and difficulty of the exercise that is most suitable for the child at that point in time. This is no easy task.
We will need to research any possible adverse effects of a rapid training program. Many people on cerebellum based programs, myself included, have reported 'bad days' when they experience sudden mode swings. These have much in common with the problems seen in teenagers and are probably a natural side-effect of the changes the brain is undertaking and not in themselves anything to worry about. However more intensive training may bring about bigger problems. Further research is needed.
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