[Applause]
just this past week Elon Musk announced
the formation of a new company called
neuro-link designed to put artificial
intelligence into our brains my talk is
somewhat similar to that in that I’m
going to talk about using technology to
improve human cognitive function but I’m
not talking about in putting anything
into a child’s brain except for
knowledge skills and capacity so this
talk is a little less invasive than what
Elon is considering and perhaps a little
less cyber board-like I would like to
nominate the invention of the written
word of reading and writing as possibly
one of the greatest achievements in
human history it is truly amazing that
the human brain can turn abstract
squiggles on a page into a meaningful
form of communication when you look at
my handwriting here our brain is able to
look at the you and truly the you and
human they they’re actually not even
close to the same shape the way I write
and our brain through an intricate
process of cognitive activities is able
to determine that those are both the
letter U
likewise towards the bottom of my scroll
my Oh in into my Oh inform my oh and
communication are dramatically different
shapes how is it possible that the human
brain can do this turn it into a
meaningful form of communication reading
one could argue it’s one of the most
important skills in disruption it is
actually necessary to be able to read to
be a disruptor in a technological world
reading connects our ideas to other
people’s ideas it gives us access to
education to income to health and helps
us explore the boundaries of what it
means to be human
how this happens is incredible we are
born we are pre-wired to speak
we are not pre-wired to read what has to
happen for us to read is we develop
neural systems brain networks that
enable this to happen
visual auditory memory attention
decision-making organization speed all
have to develop together in this miracle
of neuroplasticity that the human brain
through experience through repetition
through repetition through repetition
builds neural networks and in so doing
we create a reading machine the problem
is that one in five of us fails to learn
to become good readers it is a
staggering number of illiterate humans
despite attempts in school exposure to
the alphabet exposure to phonics one in
five of us does not learn how to read
this population includes children with
language based learning difficulties
such as dyslexia to which I will refer
in a bit people who grow up in
impoverished environments where the
amount of language and discourse in
reading and vocabulary is minimal and
people who grow up in traumatic
situations where survival is the goal
rather than anything as grandiose as
reading when we look at the neuro images
of brains in these three populations we
realize that the system’s the neuro
plastic systems have not developed
properly the cost is enormous to the
individual who does not learn how to
read she or he becomes pounded with the
message that your slow or lazy or dumb
because you can’t read and one begins to
believe that for our schools special
education is incredibly expensive
the amount of individual educational
planning required small group maybe even
tutorial classes highly trained teachers
best efforts have only been largely
successful and to society when we look
at the cost of illiteracy our prisons
are full of people who cannot read do
not read and particularly in
incarcerated youth estimates are the
numbers as high as 70 to 80% of young
people in prison are illiterate we began
to look at this issue at the school I
run the Carroll School in Lincoln
Massachusetts we wanted to understand if
we could do better if we could disrupt
traditional approaches to reading
instruction looking at the neuro images
of brains of dyslexics trying to read we
realize the activation patterns are not
typical you can see this on an fMRI
there are cognitive processes that we
can identify as the culprits why is this
not a good reading machine why does this
brain not learn how to read possibly
because of deficits in reaction time
which I’ll talk about in a bit or
processing speed how much information
can a brain take in and make sense of
looking at my scribble is that a no is
that a no back and forth back and forth
back and forth constant decision-making
looking at executive functions such as
organization and planning and
decision-making looking at a variety of
memory factors working memory and
short-term memory we hypothesized that
we could build a better approach to
addressing illiteracy than common
practice and we began doing that we
looked at the population of children at
the Carroll School 414 beautifully
diagnosed children with language based
learning difficulties such as dyslexia
these children have incredible gifts
superpowers dyslexic advantages in many
many
areas to become the inventors and
creators and designers of our world but
their brains are not good reading
machines and reading gives access so we
started looking at the cognitive profile
of these children and realized there
were some commonalities there were some
neural systems that did not develop we
wondered if we could encourage or
stimulate a neuro plastic response in
dyslexic children we looked at the
profile of our students 60% of them had
a significant deficit in a skill called
reaction time reaction time is this in
front of a computer screen child sees
the stimulus come up on the screen hit
the spacebar hit the spacebar every time
you see any stimulus at all hit the
spacebar then the task can become more
complicated anytime you see a red circle
hit the spacebar see a red square do not
hit the spacebar red triangle don’t hit
the spacebar red circle hit the spacebar
blue circle don’t hit the spacebar 60%
of our children are very poor at this
task is that a coincidence that in a
population of children with dyslexia we
would have this high level of reaction
time difficulty we thought it was not a
coincidence
we thought there was probably a
correlation so again pursuing our
hypothesis could we build a technology
that addressed the lack of neuro plastic
development of this particular neural
channel reaction time is a fascinating
topic when talking about reading for two
reasons one reaction time is not a
linguistic task almost all interventions
designed to help children learn how to
read have been linguistically based
through history we were pursuing the
thought that maybe this non-linguistic
tasks really a decision-making task was
highly related to oral reading fluency
the second thing that is fascinating
about reaction time is it’s almost
perfectly
correlated with oral reading fluency so
if one has had exposure to the alphabet
and to phonics and to elementary school
instruction and one has good reaction
time scores one is most likely to have
excellent oral reading fluency how many
words can a child read correctly in a
paragraph in a minute
conversely if one has horrible reaction
time scores it’s most likely ones going
to be a poor or a reader so we pursue
this hypothesis we developed a product
called targeted cognitive intervention
or TCI what it does is it assesses a
child’s cognitive profile where’s she’s
strong where she weak
where’s his profile like the Alps and
based on the profile the platform will
assign activities will basically
individualize and send curriculum to
each individual based on the profile
what we’re trying to do is encourage the
appropriate neuroplastic response what
we realized is that doing this was like
going to physical therapy children did
not love having us poke at what their
weakest at so like physical therapy you
go there to strengthen a component of
your body that isn’t working properly we
were poking at what children were not so
good at cognitively so we realized we
had to try to make this fun so we
borrowed games that are out there in the
open market such as whack-a-mole
whack-a-mole is a reaction time task
every time you see the blue mole get
your clicker on it and click and that
can get harder and harder and harder
more complicated with more variables
over time here’s what TCI does seamless
affordable scalable transportable and as
I’ll show you in a second effective step
one assess the child’s profile where are
the strengths where the weaknesses
second in somewhat of a recommendation
engine concept although the designers
tell me that’s not exactly what it is
based on your profile if you have weak
reaction time scores it will deliver to
you
reaction time curriculum all
computer-based all cloud-based then the
child will engage in the activities
we’ve been using six weeks per school
year five days a week forty minutes per
session and the children interact with
what they most need to learn the
cognitive network they most need to
develop as the child does well the
technology makes the tasks harder as a
child struggles the technology moves the
challenge to a lower level making sure
that children’s stay in the flow zone
then every day the platform updates the
data and shares that with the teacher
every morning at 1:00 a.m. new data on
student performance because this is like
physical therapy because this is a
little bit painful very often teachers
share those data with their students so
the children can see that their efforts
are paying off that they are making
progress that they are moving in a good
direction
now reaction time is not something you
can go to the family picnic and brag
about Johnny has fantastic reaction time
there has to be some sort of a socially
valid correlate to this work and that’s
the fifth skill that the platform
delivers to the educational process
which is it correlates the child’s work
in reaction time in this case to
academic outcomes we have been doing
this work for six years
we’ve only had the technology platform
for this year the 2016-2017 school year
we used to do this in the old fashioned
way
labour-intensive too much demand on the
teachers data collection was tiresome
and statistical analysis was done by
hand the platform does all this work for
us now however when we started six years
ago we looked at a group of 55 children
who on the Left bar up here 65% of them
had multiple cognitive weaknesses that’s
the red on the right-hand bar the green
is how many children had no measurable
cognitive weaknesses in this area and
there were very few of them they did
their TCI work six weeks five days a
week forty minutes a day the middle bars
what that same group of children looked
like in seventh grade so we start to see
the red diminish we start to see the
green increase fewer kids with multiple
problems more kids with no measurable
problems and on the right is what they
look like in eighth grade after they had
done another round with TC I do TC I
each year so we started to believe that
this was having a dramatic impact on
their cognitive skills did it have
dramatic impact on something that
society cares about such as academic
outcome this chart shows four different
groups of children who have received the
very best that Carroll school knows how
to offer small group instruction
intensive tutorial focus areas where
they are weakest academically highly
trained teachers groups one and two are
showing a positive trajectory as they
move from fifth sixth seventh to eighth
grade which is remarkable given that
they haven’t done that prior to coming
to our school both those groups were
growing at roughly a rate of two
percentiles per year so if for example a
child was ten percentiles below mean at
the beginning it would take about five
years to close the gap to catch up to
classmates to peers
not bad you can tell that groups three
and four have a dramatically more
positive trajectory in those lines the
only difference between groups one and
two and three and four is the amount of
TCI they had the amount of targeted
cognitive intervention in concert with
good phonics instruction group three is
growing at a rate of five point three
percent aisles per year the child was 10
percent I was behind about two years to
catch up group four is growing at 7%
Isles per year less than two years to
catch up they three and four receive TCI
earlier and more often than groups one
and two we are excited about this
disruption this is taking a school
that’s been successful for nearly 50
years and through the asking ourselves
tough questions we’ve come up with
something as having significantly better
outcomes for children we want to share
TCI with the world our goal is to get
this out to as many children adults in
this country and others as possible
we’re currently conducting research with
the neuro scientists at MIT hopefully in
a peer review published article will be
out soon we are conducting pilots in
other Boston area schools next year and
hope that pilots will go worldwide our
goal with TCI
is a scalable transportable effective
and scalable intervention to address a
massive literacy problem in our country
55 million children 20% of school-age
children fail to gain literacy skills
just this past week Elon Musk announced
the formation of a new company called
neuro-link designed to put artificial
intelligence into our brains my talk is
somewhat similar to that in that I’m
going to talk about using technology to
improve human cognitive function but I’m
not talking about in putting anything
into a child’s brain except for
knowledge skills and capacity so this
talk is a little less invasive than what
Elon is considering and perhaps a little
less cyber board-like I would like to
nominate the invention of the written
word of reading and writing as possibly
one of the greatest achievements in
human history it is truly amazing that
the human brain can turn abstract
squiggles on a page into a meaningful
form of communication when you look at
my handwriting here our brain is able to
look at the you and truly the you and
human they they’re actually not even
close to the same shape the way I write
and our brain through an intricate
process of cognitive activities is able
to determine that those are both the
letter U
likewise towards the bottom of my scroll
my Oh in into my Oh inform my oh and
communication are dramatically different
shapes how is it possible that the human
brain can do this turn it into a
meaningful form of communication reading
one could argue it’s one of the most
important skills in disruption it is
actually necessary to be able to read to
be a disruptor in a technological world
reading connects our ideas to other
people’s ideas it gives us access to
education to income to health and helps
us explore the boundaries of what it
means to be human
how this happens is incredible we are
born we are pre-wired to speak
we are not pre-wired to read what has to
happen for us to read is we develop
neural systems brain networks that
enable this to happen
visual auditory memory attention
decision-making organization speed all
have to develop together in this miracle
of neuroplasticity that the human brain
through experience through repetition
through repetition through repetition
builds neural networks and in so doing
we create a reading machine the problem
is that one in five of us fails to learn
to become good readers it is a
staggering number of illiterate humans
despite attempts in school exposure to
the alphabet exposure to phonics one in
five of us does not learn how to read
this population includes children with
language based learning difficulties
such as dyslexia to which I will refer
in a bit people who grow up in
impoverished environments where the
amount of language and discourse in
reading and vocabulary is minimal and
people who grow up in traumatic
situations where survival is the goal
rather than anything as grandiose as
reading when we look at the neuro images
of brains in these three populations we
realize that the system’s the neuro
plastic systems have not developed
properly the cost is enormous to the
individual who does not learn how to
read she or he becomes pounded with the
message that your slow or lazy or dumb
because you can’t read and one begins to
believe that for our schools special
education is incredibly expensive
the amount of individual educational
planning required small group maybe even
tutorial classes highly trained teachers
best efforts have only been largely
successful and to society when we look
at the cost of illiteracy our prisons
are full of people who cannot read do
not read and particularly in
incarcerated youth estimates are the
numbers as high as 70 to 80% of young
people in prison are illiterate we began
to look at this issue at the school I
run the Carroll School in Lincoln
Massachusetts we wanted to understand if
we could do better if we could disrupt
traditional approaches to reading
instruction looking at the neuro images
of brains of dyslexics trying to read we
realize the activation patterns are not
typical you can see this on an fMRI
there are cognitive processes that we
can identify as the culprits why is this
not a good reading machine why does this
brain not learn how to read possibly
because of deficits in reaction time
which I’ll talk about in a bit or
processing speed how much information
can a brain take in and make sense of
looking at my scribble is that a no is
that a no back and forth back and forth
back and forth constant decision-making
looking at executive functions such as
organization and planning and
decision-making looking at a variety of
memory factors working memory and
short-term memory we hypothesized that
we could build a better approach to
addressing illiteracy than common
practice and we began doing that we
looked at the population of children at
the Carroll School 414 beautifully
diagnosed children with language based
learning difficulties such as dyslexia
these children have incredible gifts
superpowers dyslexic advantages in many
many
areas to become the inventors and
creators and designers of our world but
their brains are not good reading
machines and reading gives access so we
started looking at the cognitive profile
of these children and realized there
were some commonalities there were some
neural systems that did not develop we
wondered if we could encourage or
stimulate a neuro plastic response in
dyslexic children we looked at the
profile of our students 60% of them had
a significant deficit in a skill called
reaction time reaction time is this in
front of a computer screen child sees
the stimulus come up on the screen hit
the spacebar hit the spacebar every time
you see any stimulus at all hit the
spacebar then the task can become more
complicated anytime you see a red circle
hit the spacebar see a red square do not
hit the spacebar red triangle don’t hit
the spacebar red circle hit the spacebar
blue circle don’t hit the spacebar 60%
of our children are very poor at this
task is that a coincidence that in a
population of children with dyslexia we
would have this high level of reaction
time difficulty we thought it was not a
coincidence
we thought there was probably a
correlation so again pursuing our
hypothesis could we build a technology
that addressed the lack of neuro plastic
development of this particular neural
channel reaction time is a fascinating
topic when talking about reading for two
reasons one reaction time is not a
linguistic task almost all interventions
designed to help children learn how to
read have been linguistically based
through history we were pursuing the
thought that maybe this non-linguistic
tasks really a decision-making task was
highly related to oral reading fluency
the second thing that is fascinating
about reaction time is it’s almost
perfectly
correlated with oral reading fluency so
if one has had exposure to the alphabet
and to phonics and to elementary school
instruction and one has good reaction
time scores one is most likely to have
excellent oral reading fluency how many
words can a child read correctly in a
paragraph in a minute
conversely if one has horrible reaction
time scores it’s most likely ones going
to be a poor or a reader so we pursue
this hypothesis we developed a product
called targeted cognitive intervention
or TCI what it does is it assesses a
child’s cognitive profile where’s she’s
strong where she weak
where’s his profile like the Alps and
based on the profile the platform will
assign activities will basically
individualize and send curriculum to
each individual based on the profile
what we’re trying to do is encourage the
appropriate neuroplastic response what
we realized is that doing this was like
going to physical therapy children did
not love having us poke at what their
weakest at so like physical therapy you
go there to strengthen a component of
your body that isn’t working properly we
were poking at what children were not so
good at cognitively so we realized we
had to try to make this fun so we
borrowed games that are out there in the
open market such as whack-a-mole
whack-a-mole is a reaction time task
every time you see the blue mole get
your clicker on it and click and that
can get harder and harder and harder
more complicated with more variables
over time here’s what TCI does seamless
affordable scalable transportable and as
I’ll show you in a second effective step
one assess the child’s profile where are
the strengths where the weaknesses
second in somewhat of a recommendation
engine concept although the designers
tell me that’s not exactly what it is
based on your profile if you have weak
reaction time scores it will deliver to
you
reaction time curriculum all
computer-based all cloud-based then the
child will engage in the activities
we’ve been using six weeks per school
year five days a week forty minutes per
session and the children interact with
what they most need to learn the
cognitive network they most need to
develop as the child does well the
technology makes the tasks harder as a
child struggles the technology moves the
challenge to a lower level making sure
that children’s stay in the flow zone
then every day the platform updates the
data and shares that with the teacher
every morning at 1:00 a.m. new data on
student performance because this is like
physical therapy because this is a
little bit painful very often teachers
share those data with their students so
the children can see that their efforts
are paying off that they are making
progress that they are moving in a good
direction
now reaction time is not something you
can go to the family picnic and brag
about Johnny has fantastic reaction time
there has to be some sort of a socially
valid correlate to this work and that’s
the fifth skill that the platform
delivers to the educational process
which is it correlates the child’s work
in reaction time in this case to
academic outcomes we have been doing
this work for six years
we’ve only had the technology platform
for this year the 2016-2017 school year
we used to do this in the old fashioned
way
labour-intensive too much demand on the
teachers data collection was tiresome
and statistical analysis was done by
hand the platform does all this work for
us now however when we started six years
ago we looked at a group of 55 children
who on the Left bar up here 65% of them
had multiple cognitive weaknesses that’s
the red on the right-hand bar the green
is how many children had no measurable
cognitive weaknesses in this area and
there were very few of them they did
their TCI work six weeks five days a
week forty minutes a day the middle bars
what that same group of children looked
like in seventh grade so we start to see
the red diminish we start to see the
green increase fewer kids with multiple
problems more kids with no measurable
problems and on the right is what they
look like in eighth grade after they had
done another round with TC I do TC I
each year so we started to believe that
this was having a dramatic impact on
their cognitive skills did it have
dramatic impact on something that
society cares about such as academic
outcome this chart shows four different
groups of children who have received the
very best that Carroll school knows how
to offer small group instruction
intensive tutorial focus areas where
they are weakest academically highly
trained teachers groups one and two are
showing a positive trajectory as they
move from fifth sixth seventh to eighth
grade which is remarkable given that
they haven’t done that prior to coming
to our school both those groups were
growing at roughly a rate of two
percentiles per year so if for example a
child was ten percentiles below mean at
the beginning it would take about five
years to close the gap to catch up to
classmates to peers
not bad you can tell that groups three
and four have a dramatically more
positive trajectory in those lines the
only difference between groups one and
two and three and four is the amount of
TCI they had the amount of targeted
cognitive intervention in concert with
good phonics instruction group three is
growing at a rate of five point three
percent aisles per year the child was 10
percent I was behind about two years to
catch up group four is growing at 7%
Isles per year less than two years to
catch up they three and four receive TCI
earlier and more often than groups one
and two we are excited about this
disruption this is taking a school
that’s been successful for nearly 50
years and through the asking ourselves
tough questions we’ve come up with
something as having significantly better
outcomes for children we want to share
TCI with the world our goal is to get
this out to as many children adults in
this country and others as possible
we’re currently conducting research with
the neuro scientists at MIT hopefully in
a peer review published article will be
out soon we are conducting pilots in
other Boston area schools next year and
hope that pilots will go worldwide our
goal with TCI
is a scalable transportable effective
and scalable intervention to address a
massive literacy problem in our country
55 million children 20% of school-age
children fail to gain literacy skills
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