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Overview

The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential is a nonprofit educational organization that serves parents and children. The Institutes introduces parents to the field of child brain development. Parents learn how the brain grows and how to speed and enhance that growth.

: Clarke Hall

What Do They Do At The Institutes?

Suppose that you had spent over forty years of your life along with fifty to a hundred other people searching the world over to learn as much as you could learn about a subject and then found you could sum up everything you had learned in a single paragraph.

Would you find yourself vastly depressed that those thousands of people-years could be stated in a single, straightforward, rather short paragraph? Or would you find yourself exultant that you had learned to state all that you knew in a paragraph?

That's what has happened to us. Sometimes we see it one way and sometimes the other.

When we think of some of the hurt children whom we still fail to get totally well, we think of all that we are still working on to find out about how the brain functions and tend to be upset that we can say it all in a single paragraph.

On the other hand, when we think of all the hurt kids who are now splendidly improved or totally well, and when we think of all the magnificent kids who started out as average and who are now functioning beyond our wildest dreams of twenty years ago, we are inclined to think it's a pretty good paragraph.

The world has looked at brain growth and development as IF they were predestined and unchangeable facts. We have discovered that brain growth and development are a single dynamic process. This is a process which can be stopped (as it is by profound brain injury). This is a process which can be slowed (as it is by moderate brain injury) but most significantly, this is a process which can be speeded.

Like it or not, this is what we have spent our lives finding out.

It may well be (with one exception) the most important precept we shall ever have.

If it were, we are inclined to believe that it has been worth those thousands of people-years, for in that paragraph were the seeds of The Gentle Revolution.

But what good would such knowledge be if we then did not know what we could do with that knowledge?

And here we find that exception. Happily or unhappily, depending upon whether we are looking backward or forward, we can also sum up all we have learned to do about it in a single paragraph.

It is difficult to say which of the two paragraphs is more important.

If you are the sort of person who is made uncomfortable by doing things (however successfully) without understanding precisely why they work (as we are), then you will see the first precept as being the most important.

If, on the other hand, you are the sort of person who wants to get on with it and who is happiest when he sees splendid results being achieved (as we are), then you will see the second precept as being most important.

All we do at The Institutes is to give kids visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation with increased frequency, intensity, and duration in recognition of the orderly way in which the brain grows.

THAT IS ALL WE DO AT THE INSTITUTES.

Come to think of it, we don't even do that. What we actually do is to teach parents to do that.

That's all we do to make paralyzed children walk.

That's all we do to make comatose children conscious.

That's all we do to make insensate children feel.

In a world that is positive that no severely brain-injured child can ever be made well, it is not so surprising that we often fail to do so; what is surprising is that we often succeed in doing so.

That's also all we do to make average babies able to read several languages with total understanding by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to play the violin well by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to do splendid gymnastics by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to do advanced math by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to write computer programs by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to swim and dive by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to learn anything which you can present to them in an honest and factual way.

That's all we do to make average babies able to do all of those things by four years of age.

That's all we do to make average babies able to do all of those things splendidly by six years of age.

THAT'S ALL WE DO.

Or more accurately, we teach parents to do all those things.

There are just five pathways into the brain and everything Leonardo learned in his life, or you in yours, or I in mine, or your baby in his or hers, we have learned through those five pathways. Those five pathways are: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling.

Tasting and smelling are recessive pathways in man. Our pets, the dogs and cats, do them better then we do, and adults use them primarily as pleasure-seeking pathways.

These five pathways taken together form the sensory pathways, which actually make up virtually the entire back half of the brain and spinal cord.

Never forget that when you are giving a child visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation with increased frequency, intensity, and duration that you are actually physically growing his brain.