One exercise involved cards of clock faces set at different times, with the time written on the back. She started with two-handed clocks, which were a great challenge, and worked her way up to adding hands for seconds and ones for a 60^th of a second.

At the end of it, not only could she read clocks faster than normal people, but the effect generalized to her other difficulties at relating symbols.

She began for the first time to quickly grasp math, grammar, and logic. Today at Arrowsmith School, you can see kids working at computers reading 10-handed clocks in mere seconds.

In the 1970s, when Arrowsmith Young designed her program, most considered neuroplasticity a dreamy hypothesis. Yet work by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, Eric Kandel, demonstrated how the branches between neurons could grow and change with learning.

The recent discovery by the Salk Institute’s Dr. Fred Gage of brain stem cells — baby cells deep in the adult brain that can develop into new neurons — is another sign the brain can repair and regenerate itself.

Are others helped? Dan Cooper is an American. When he was 13, his math and reading skills were still at a grade 3 level, and he was told after neuropsychological testing at Tufts University that he would never read beyond grade 3 or graduate from high school.

His indefatigable mother, with a degree in special education, tried him in 10 different U.S. programs, but none helped. Refusing to give up, his mother discovered Arrowsmith School, and sent Dan to live with a Canadian family.

After three years, he was at a grade 10 level in reading and math, and went directly into his normal high school grade. He went on to graduate from college and now works in venture capital and acquisitions, and foreign trade. "I never would have achieved this without Arrowsmith," Dan says adamantly.

Jeremy, from Haliburton, Ontario, was 16 but reading at a grade 1 level when he came to Arrowsmith School. Most of his difficulties were in the left hemisphere. "My whole capacity to think was by going around words. All my thinking was in pictures. I thought everyone did that."

A writing assignment that took others 30 minutes took him four hours. He was below the first percentile for English word recognition on standard tests. His auditory memory for verbal instructions was very weak. (Children with this difficulty are often yelled at for forgetting or being irresponsible.) His handwriting was indecipherable, and his speech laboured.

Both Jeremy’s parents are teachers and tried compensatory strategies to no effect. "I felt I didn’t have any hope of being able to get better at reading so I stopped trying."

Learning disabilities don’t affect just the classroom. "Outside of school, I couldn’t read washroom signs to tell which one to use. If the kids passed around a written joke, I’d survey their facial expression, then respond accordingly."

After 14 months at Arrowsmith School, Jeremy is already reading at a grade 7 level, and his phonics are at a grade 13 level.

"The words jump off the page at me now. A door that was closed is now opening. In speech I can get to the point, and my reasoning is faster. I now have a memory for names and oral instructions. Because of my learning disabilities, all my other strengths were in a box."

Arrowsmith School tries to get kids to perform at above-average levels on the brain exercises and standardized tests before returning them to regular school. In a follow-up study, 80% of children had met their academic goals.

At Arrowsmith School, children who had been diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities quietly focus on their computers. Some are on Ritalin, and some, as they get better, safely come off medication, revealing that their attention problems were really the end result of learning problems.

For more minor problems, after-school exercises suffice. For significant disorders, full-time work is required. High-functioning adults with focal problems, such as the inability to learn foreign languages, severe problems with organization, trouble following non-verbal cues, slow reading, or even clumsiness can also be helped.

Arrowsmith’s work has major implications for education in an information age. Some teaching techniques abandoned in the sixties as too rigid may be worth bringing back.

Rote memorization probably strengthened visual and auditory memory (and hence thinking in language and pictures), just as an almost fanatical attention to handwriting probably helped to strengthen motor-symbol-sequencing capacities — and thus not only helped handwriting but also added speed, automaticity, and fluency to reading and speaking.

Timing is important. Neuroplasticity is at its maximum in children up to 11 years old, though fortunately teenagers and adults can still benefit after that age. Also to be considered is the emotional devastation caused by learning disorders, as they lead to a bottleneck in overall development.

Children often become depressed, troubled teenagers as they fall behind. Some withdraw, others explode with frustration. Some who make it to university crash and burn when their workload increases and career options dwindle.

Indeed, many depressed adolescents and young adults, or people not responding to psychotherapy, have unrecognized learning disabilities. Individuals can have the 19 key brain areas tested at Arrowsmith School.