Barbara Arrowsmith Young

Biography

Arrowsmith Young was born in Toronto on November 28, 1951 to Jack and Barbara Young. Her father was an electrical engineer who worked for Canadian General Electric. Her mother was a teacher. As a child she had exceptional visual and auditory memory, but it was coupled with several severe deficits in other areas, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, and problems with spatial reasoning, logic, and kinesthetic perception. With the help of her mother she eventually achieved basic literacy and numeracy. However, she struggled throughout elementary and high school. Her method, which was the subject of a 2008 CBC documentary Fixing My Brain, has proved controversial. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge devoted one of the chapters in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, to Arrowsmith Young and described her approach as “an important discovery”. However, the Arrowsmith Program has been criticized by several neuroscientists, psychologists and cognitive scientists, including Anne Castles, Max Coltheart, Emma Burrows and Linda Siegel, for basing its claims on anecdotal evidence. They have noted that there have been no peer-reviewed studies published which use randomized controlled trials to evaluate whether it is actually more effective than any other “brain training” programs..

In 1977 she had met Joshua Cohen, a PhD. student at OISE who also had learning disabilities and ran a small clinic for learning disabled children. Cohen introduced her to the work of Alexander Luria. According to Arrowsmith Young, Luria’s 1971 book The Man with the Shattered World which documented the recovery under his treatment of the brain-injured soldier Lev Zasetsky was profoundly influential on her, as was the work of Mark Rosenzweig on neuroplasticity. Using the ideas of Luria and Rosenzweig, she began developing a series of exercises in 1978 which she states finally helped to overcome her learning disabilities.

The re-opened Arrowsmith School in Toronto attracted increasing numbers of students and eventually opened other branches. The Arrowsmith Program was also franchised to other private schools and in some public ones as well. In 2012 she published The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, an autobiographical account of how she overcame her own severe learning disabilities combined with 30 case studies of learning disabled children who she says overcame similar problems by using her method.