Retraining Your Brain

What?" When Nicole Davis was six, that was her standard reply to even the simplest question. Although seemingly bright, she lagged far behind her peers in speaking and reading and had a hard time making friends. Two years of private speech therapy had failed to bring her up to speed. So her mother Donna enrolled her in "Fast ForWord," a powerful video-game program developed by Scientific Learning Corp. of Berkeley, Calif., to aid children like her who cannot process the sounds of language fast enough to comprehend normal speech. Nicole spent six weeks of intense game playing at a speech clinic in New Jersey, emerging "like a different child," Donna Davis says. Today the ebullient second-grader chatters away with classmates, gets good grades and has stellar reading skills. As Nicole puts it, "I like to write stories and poems, read books and play with my friends."

The software that allowed Nicole to shine represents a promising application of recent and remarkable discoveries about the power of the brain to learn new tricks. Scientists are finding that the brain is "massively plastic"--not rigidly fixed like a computer chip--and can rewire itself throughout life with the help of rigorous training. The Fast ForWord games are like mental aerobics--designed to strengthen weak connections in those parts of the brain that support language skills.

The remarkable plasticity of the brain has put scientists in hot pursuit of novel ways to treat a host of ailments. "What we are is a product of learning progressions in the brain," says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of Scientific Learning. "A lot of people are thinking about how to use intensive training to remediate the impairments of mankind."

The discovery also represents a business opportunity. Scientific Learning is an education start-up that plans to launch an initial public offering in mid-July. The company, which lost $10.7 million on sales of $5.1 million last year, has targeted language and reading skills at a time when an estimated 16 million U.S. youngsters between the ages of four and 13 have reading problems. The vast but fragmented market for reading improvement already encompasses clinics, homes and schools. Leading companies range from niche players like Lindamood Bell Learning Processes (1998 revenues: $11 million) of San Luis Obispo, Calif., which operates centers for children with learning disabilities, to the Learning Company (1998 revenues: $839.3 million), the producer of Reader Rabbit and other educational software that Mattel acquired in a $3.5 billion stock swap last spring.

Scientific Learning scored its biggest coup in May with a pilot project to provide Fast ForWord to the Chicago public school system. Right now, private clinicians are the chief providers of Fast ForWord training, which can cost more than $2,500.