Cellfield
What is the Cellfield Program?
Cellfield is a revolutionary reading program designed to create the neural connections in the brain that are responsible for proper reading and comprehension and enhance major sensory functions critical to reading. It’s based on the principles of brain plasticity (the capacity of the brain to change when stimulated in the right way).
What are the Benefits?
Participants in the Cellfield program will reap benefits including:
- Improved Auditory Processing Speed
- Improved Visual Processing Speed
- Bond Auditory and Visual Functions
- Increased Working Memory Capacity
- Improved Eye Movement Control
- Improved Attention
- Improved Motivation
- Synchronized data
Who can Benefit?
Research on the Cellfield Program has found a high applicability for students (ages 6 and up) with reading difficulties.
How Long does it Take?
Cellfield Program is a 12-week program excluding assessments and eye examination.
How does the Intervention Process work?
The process of reading involves the processing of visual, auditory, oral, and motor functions. These processes all occur in the sub-cortical areas of the brain involved in automatic functions. If these processing components are disturbed in their interrelatedness, it causes the brain to contemplate cognitively what the sub-cortical areas are not doing automatically, and it starts to overload the active working memory which is used to hold information for short periods of time as the brain contemplates the detail of the story, identifies main ideas, and forms a workable comprehension of the story, article, or word math problem. This prevents the executive function from performing the highest level of processing tasks required for fluent, age appropriate reading speed.
Normal reading requires high-speed visual recognition of symbols (letters, words, and sentences). Problems in some aspects of ocular motility (binocular eye movement control) can materially impede the visual recognition and therefore affect a person’s ability to read.
Cellfield intervention is aimed to remediate multiple causes of language and learning difficulties by targeting several deficits concurrently in phonological, visual, and visual to phonological processing. The strongest Cellfield treatment outcome is phonological processing – the ability to decode unfamiliar words.
What is the process?
Cellfield presents in Phase I reading materials from a computer environment that is accepted in working memory as being novel. The high level of multifunction, simultaneous activity creates conditions of high brain plasticity and ‘turbo charges’ concentration, attention, motivation, and retention, allowing learning to take place in the small window of time that is available in working memory.
Phase I is the ‘Neural Redevelopment’ conducted over 10 sessions of about 1 hour per session per day over two weeks. The students are assigned a few worksheet each day to complete before the next session. These assignments correspond with the current work in progress during the Cellfield sessions and also relate the visual image of the computer screen to paper and writing. The objective of Phase I is to break down the root causes of resistance and then to ensure that the child makes a sustainable transition into reading printed text streams with fluency and good comprehension.
On average, children (and adults) emerge from Cellfield intervention in Phase I with remarkable gains in the skills necessary for reading. These skills need to be consolidated, developed, and automatized in the Cellfield Phase II intervention. Phase II has a central focus of reading fluency support. It composes of ten1-hour sessions (1 hour/week) delivered over ten weeks in accordance with the Operations Manual (August 2014) issued by Cellfield. The student is guided into the world of reading, avoiding the negative “trigger points” of the “over-habituated” and “skill-and-drill” past.
Phase II requires guided reading at home, supervised or assisted by parent or guardian. Coming to the centre once a week to maintain the momentum of learning from Phase I and to assist the parents to continue building the momentum at home. An assignment book is used as a record of the student’s progress and strengthens the connection between home and practice.
Pre-Phase I assessment and Post-Phase II assessments are conducted as prescribed by Cellfield. The Cellfield Program is a 12-week program excluding assessments and eye examination.
NOTE: All of our programs here at TLC include the option of complimentary AAT(Animal Assisted Therapy) as an added bonus for smoothing sessions and boosting results; studies have proven that the inclusion of AAT treatment bilaterally to other forms of therapeutic treatment greatly improve the effectiveness due to the significant drop in stress hormones provided by the contact with an animal along with the defusing of tension during first time experiences; the presence of a therapy animal also promotes healthy brain hormones that are proven to boost self esteem and communication skills.
What is the Objective?
Beginner readers use the parieto temporal area of the brain to learn to read. When reading, students have to decode and identify each word individually, which causes them to read slowly, one word at a time. On the other hand, experienced readers use different neural pathways to read – the occipito temporal area of the brain. Skilled readers have automatized all the basic skills needed for reading, and can go directly from what their eyes see to meaning.
Those readers who get stuck at the parieto temporal stage are stuck for neural reasons and will never be able to read fluently with good comprehension. Their working memories are permanently overloaded with lower order skills that they just cannot automatize and make the transition to becoming skilled readers. Cellfield has been developed to help these readers create new neural pathways and transition to becoming skilled readers.
Additional Information about the Cellfield Program