The Cerebellum and ADHD - what we need to know!
Check out all of Kate's latest workshops and resources here
Did you know that we can create new neural pathways using neuroplasticity by activating a part of the brain called the cerebellum? Enhancing this part of our brain - over the pre-frontal cortex - can ease and lessen our ADHD symptoms and create a more effortless daily life.
This week's guest is Wynford Dore, an entrepreneur on a mission to change the lives of one million children. Wynford is the founder of Zing Brain Development programmes, and for the last twenty years, He has focused on changing the world, one brain at a time. He's funded many research projects and now works with the leading academics to determine the best solutions that successfully accelerate and develop learning in the brain—which finds our hidden potential and increases mental capacity…. including creating greater, stronger emotional regulation.
During today's episode of The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast, Kate and Wynford talked about:
- What is the cerebellum and why is it so important to neurodivergence
- How can we stimulate and activate the cerebellum
- Stepping out of our thinking brain, the pre-frontal cortex and executive thinking and using the cerebellum more
- What we need to know about the cerebellum and ADHD
- New ways of learning for neurodivergent brains
- Creating new neural pathways and plasticity to enhance the cerebellum
- Wynford's Zing programme to help people activate their cerebellum
- Activities and ways to help activate the cerebellum
Check out Kate's latest workshop and resources here
Kate Moryoussef is a women’s ADHD Lifestyle & Wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed ADHD women find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity, and clarity.
Follow the podcast on Instagram here.
Follow Kate on Instagram here.
Find Kate's resources on ADDitude magazine here.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
So I'm just interrupting today's episode to let you know about a brand new live workshop that I've got coming up on the 24th of May at 1pm and this workshop is all about reducing your ADHD overwhelm in family life and discovering and welcoming in more calm and regulation.
Speaker A:Now, I want to let you know that I don't have all the answers, but it's something that I deal with on a daily basis and I've discovered over the years of understanding my own ADHD and coupled with all my coaching and talking to my experts on the podcast as well, well as all my hundreds of coaching clients, that there is a way of living without feeling in this sort of default state, of feeling like you're drowning, that you're stressed all the time.
Speaker A:And juggling family life alongside an ADHD brain can feel overwhelming at best and debilitating at worst.
Speaker A:And life is happening at the moment at breakneck speed.
Speaker A:We are all struggling to feel balanced, like we're keeping up.
Speaker A:And so I wanted to share with you six steps that I know have worked for me and six steps that I talk about to many of my private coaching clients.
Speaker A:I wanted to share this in a group live workshop.
Speaker A:So if this is something that you are dealing with right now and you would love some more support, new ideas, different perspectives, I would love it if you could join me.
Speaker A:All the details are on the Today's Show Notes but also on my website which is ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk if you head to the Show Notes or my website, find all the information and it's in one hour you'll learn some new ways of coping and feeling more resilient and looking at life differently and feeling like you don't have to be at the mercy of everything that's piling up on top of you and that you do have control and choice over what you choose to bring into your family life.
Speaker A:So I really look forward to seeing you there.
Speaker A:It's the 24th of May, 1:00 and it's all the details are on my website.
Speaker A:Now back to today's episode and welcome to another episode of ADHD Women's Wellbeing Wisdom.
Speaker A:Little short bite sized pieces of wisdom that I've curated from all the many, many episodes that have been recorded over this time.
Speaker A:And I really hope that this short insight will help you on the week ahead.
Speaker A:So I'm really excited to share some of the conversation that I had with the fantastic Winford Door in today's Shorter Epis episode.
Speaker A:Now, Winford has created an amazing brain program and it's all based on the cerebellum.
Speaker A:And I wanted to be able to share this conversation, the real key points of this conversation, again, because it's so, so powerful that we're understanding how we can build new neural pathways and use neuroplasticity to help enhance the cerebellum, which is a part of our brain that can really help improve life with ADHD and any neurodivergence as well.
Speaker A:And Winford has really dedicated a huge chunk of his life because of a personal story with his own daughter and how we can start understanding the power of our brain so we can help ourselves thrive and succeed in this life by simply just having more awareness of the neural pathways and the parts of our brain which just need a bit of extra help with adhd.
Speaker A:So have a listen to this conversation I had with Winford.
Speaker A:Dorr.
Speaker B:What I've now discovered is that there's two fundamental things that dramatically reduce our mental capacity or our children's mental capacity.
Speaker B:One of them is the cerebellum, and that affects the way our skills are developed.
Speaker B:If we are very good at some things, natural at some things, it's because the cerebellum has done its job fully and we've got very precise, very automatic skills and we don't have to think about them.
Speaker B:We can perform those skills effortlessly.
Speaker B:But if there's some parts of our life that are struggling a bit because.
Speaker B:And we don't find those things as automatic and as effortless as they should be because we're having to think about them, it's because the cerebellum hasn't done its job well.
Speaker B:One of the problems about the cerebellum is that it's only been understood, really, this last 10 years or so.
Speaker B:Fortunately, the mentor that took me under his wing, Professor Rod Nicholson, he started teaching me about the cerebellum and the importance of it.
Speaker B:And I really would love you to have Rod Nicholson on as a guest if ever you got a chance.
Speaker B:He's the most amazing guy, he's the most humble guy, but I have to give him thanks and praise for plugging me into everything I'm trying to share with you now.
Speaker B:So the cerebellum was misunderstood.
Speaker B:He was absolutely the cutting edge, probably one of the first neuroscientists to say the cerebellum isn't just about balance and coordination.
Speaker B:Yes, it is that, but it's masterminding the coordination of everything else we do.
Speaker B:So they now know that the cerebellum's role in balance and coordination is only a small part of its role.
Speaker B:Most of it is coordinating all other things, including things like memory functions and emotional control and so on.
Speaker B:So I was at cutting edge without realizing it.
Speaker B:And if you can imagine, Kate, I'm not in a university and I've got a daughter that was seriously depressed.
Speaker B:I was worried about the next phone call in case it was another one about her.
Speaker B:So I didn't wait for ethics committee approval.
Speaker B:I was fortunate I didn't have to wait for funding approval.
Speaker B:I just wanted to do whatever it took.
Speaker B:So I ended up funding 57 clinics and about 45,000 people going through trialing.
Speaker B:How can we change the cerebellum?
Speaker B:How can we develop the cerebellum naturally?
Speaker B:So I wasn't interested in a sticking plaster approach for Susie.
Speaker B:I was interested in finding what is the real root reason why for Susie, learning was difficult.
Speaker B:And that's what I just kept probing and probing and probing.
Speaker B:And then having found, yes, it is under development in the cerebellum, we then worked with all these people in these clinics and doctors and therapists and worked out, how can we stimulate the cerebellum to get it working.
Speaker B:And what we now know is that we needed 45,000 people because there were so many different brains in this world.
Speaker B:After we treated all these people, we could predict the best stimulation, the best challenge to the cerebellum to maximize the speed of development of that part of the brain.
Speaker B:And now the research is showing the very exercises, very type of exercises we use, use, multiply stem cells in the cerebellum.
Speaker B:Now the cerebellums, not many people know that much about it.
Speaker B:In the public domain, it actually contains 3/4 of all our brain cells.
Speaker B:It's hugely important.
Speaker B:And yet when some MRI studies, when pictures of the brain are taken to this day, they miss off the cerebellum.
Speaker B:It's scary.
Speaker B:There's a lot more research coming out about it now.
Speaker B:It's exponential.
Speaker B:So there's a quick backdrop about what was the genesis of my research.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And it's interesting because when we learn about ADHD from the beginning, we hear about the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, we sort of know about the different parts of the brain where ADHD is affected.
Speaker A:And then when I heard about the cerebellum, when Dr.
Speaker A:Halliwell was talking about it, I was like, how have I not heard about this?
Speaker A:And obviously he wrote about it in ADHD 2.0, and he gives us ideas, like you say, sort of going back to the balance, things like surfing, skateboard, anything that we can do to sort of encourage better balance.
Speaker A:And I was like, why?
Speaker A:Why is this not being taught?
Speaker A:Like, why are we not hearing about this?
Speaker A:Why.
Speaker A:Why are we not understanding it?
Speaker A:So why do you think it's so untapped?
Speaker A:And I guess, why is it so, you know, talk about adhd.
Speaker A:Why does it have such a strong link to helping improve our ADHD traits and symptoms?
Speaker B:All right, your first question.
Speaker B:How is it.
Speaker B:How is it so untapped?
Speaker B:I don't know.
Speaker B:I really don't know.
Speaker B:I've talked to many professors who are now engaged with the cerebellum, and they have such enormous difficulty getting research funding for this.
Speaker B:The research funding process, I think, is one of the things that holds back real progress, especially if there's a paradigm shift.
Speaker B:This is a paradigm shift, and it seems to take decades before research funding is directed to the paradigm shift because there's such competition for research funding.
Speaker B:Well, I was fortunate enough I didn't have to wait for research funding.
Speaker B:If a professor was telling me, there's a good idea here and nobody's tried this, off I went, and within weeks, I was feeding back to that professor and here's the results of the research, and he would discuss that with me and say, do you know what?
Speaker B:You ought to be looking in this direction now.
Speaker B:Just fine tune this.
Speaker B:And that's how our progress went.
Speaker B:So we had no constraints, no inertia at all to deal with.
Speaker B:And why is it not reaching people?
Speaker B:Well, let me try and explain what's happening neurologically.
Speaker B:What leads to adhd?
Speaker B:The prefrontal cortex is very involved, but that's kind of down the line.
Speaker B:So if someone has a skill, let's take reading, which is a major problem for many with adhd.
Speaker B:Not for all, but for many.
Speaker B:The problem with reading for the vast majority, and I mean over 90%, is that eye tracking isn't a fully developed skill.
Speaker B:It's not perfect.
Speaker B:Instead of their eyes going smoothly, their eyes are jumping around.
Speaker B:And we've got a video test which takes 10 minutes and shows parents and teachers this.
Speaker B:And they get blown away.
Speaker B:Well, the dads don't.
Speaker B:The dads get angry that the schools haven't given this to them before because all sorts of wrong assumptions were being made about why a child isn't reading easily.
Speaker B:If it's poor eye tracking, the letters are going in scrambled, sometimes backwards, sometimes upside down, because the eyes are jumping around and they've got an enormous amount of processing to do to turn that into words they can comprehend.
Speaker B:Well, that's a skill.
Speaker B:It's nothing to do with intelligence.
Speaker B:Often it's assumed they can't be very bright because they're not scoring very well.
Speaker B:No, it's usually the opposite.
Speaker B:The brighter you are, the more likely you are to have some skills incompletely developed.
Speaker B:So the cerebellum is what creates skills.
Speaker B:The cerebellum is what learns.
Speaker B:And if you end up with a skill that's underdeveloped, like we're taking the example of eye tracking, then the thinking brain has to get involved.
Speaker B:Every time you try and use that skill, they call it conscious compensation.
Speaker B:So instead of it being a fully unconscious skill, it's partly unconscious because it's partly developed.
Speaker B:But then the thinking brain gets involved to help out.
Speaker B:Now, the trouble with the thinking brain is a, it's busy, very busy.
Speaker B:We can only do about seven things at once.
Speaker B:But secondly, it's so much slower than the cortex.
Speaker B:So the prefrontal cortex, where the thinking brain is, is.
Speaker B:They're arguing about this.
Speaker B:Typically, it's a hundred thousand times slower than the cortex.
Speaker B:So if you.
Speaker B:So let's jump to riding a bike.
Speaker B:If you try and ride a bike and you haven't got those skills hardwired by the cerebellum, you fall off because it's your thinking brain telling you how to balance, trying to tell you how far to lean over, and don't forget to turn the pedals.
Speaker B:And this is how you use the brakes and so on.
Speaker B:When you're thinking about it, you fall off because the processing is too slow.
Speaker B:It's only when the cerebellum has taken those thoughts, created a program that it performs in the cortex, where it's 100,000 times faster, can you actually ride.
Speaker B:So coming back to poor reading skills and poor eye tracking, when you've got conscious compensation, in other words, the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, helping out with that underdeveloped skill, it's too slow, it's clumsy, it's bad.
Speaker B:Reading is hard work.
Speaker B:And what's worse, you're filling the thinking brain with stuff that need not, should not be there.
Speaker B:Now, that's bad for two reasons.
Speaker B:First of all, when you're reading, you're unscrambling all of those words that are jumping about, letters that are jumping about because your eyes are moving.
Speaker B:You're unscrambling that in your thinking brain, and you're trying to remember the words you've just read in your thinking brain.
Speaker B:So you get to the end of the sentence, it's been far too busy and you can't remember what you read.
Speaker B:So you read it again and again and again.
Speaker B:It's incredibly hard work.
Speaker B:And then spelling is difficult, really difficult, because every time you see a word, your letters happen to be jumping about in a different way.
Speaker B:The letters are going in in a scrambled order.
Speaker B:So learning to read is, learning to spell is very, very difficult.
Speaker B:So can you see, the cerebellum is the root cause, but the consequence happens in the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain.
Speaker B:And also in there are your executive functions.
Speaker B:So your thinking brain is overloaded, your executive functions are out the window.
Speaker B:They're well down the list of priorities.
Speaker B:And what are they?
Speaker B:Attention, impulsivity, short term memory functions, control of emotions and so on.
Speaker B:And what are the symptoms we see with adhd?
Speaker B:Well, I've just listed them.
Speaker B:So prefrontal cortex absolutely involved.
Speaker B:But the reason that's overloaded is the cerebellum hasn't been fine tuning those skills we need all the time.
Speaker A:So we should be focusing on developing the cerebellum and really nurturing it and helping it.
Speaker A:I mean, when you were just talking then and talking about the reading and you know, listen, like I said before, I've got four kids and a few of my daughters really, you know, struggle with the reading and the retaining information.
Speaker A:And as they're getting older in school, it's having an impact on their self esteem and their self belief and how they view.
Speaker A:And I know for a fact that all of them are intelligent children know that.
Speaker A:But academia equals, you know, if you're not doing well, you're not remembering, you're not able to start an essay or you're not be able to remember information in an exam that tells, you know, any kid that they're dumb, they're stupid and they're not working well enough, they're not trying hard enough, all these terrible beliefs that are sort of, you know, impregnating in them.
Speaker A:And it breaks my heart because when you talk about this, it's just obvious.
Speaker A:It's just so obvious.
Speaker A:And I have one daughter that just tells me that she just can't read.
Speaker A:She can't read.
Speaker A:She can read, but reading a book and retaining the information, she says she has to read the same, you know, paragraph five times and she's just exhausted.
Speaker A:And can you imagine that impact on you when you're reading and reading and you still can't remember the information?
Speaker A:And it just upsets me so much because I understand that.
Speaker A:And I am so grateful to understand the way I learn.
Speaker A:And the way I learn is always through audio, which is why I've got this podcast.
Speaker A:And this is why so many people listen to the podcast is because they learn much better through audio.
Speaker A:And I just wish that there was, you know, those options for kids in schools, you know, give them that option as well.
Speaker B:We really should have learned to focus on a focus on the upsides that ADHD have and those with dyslexia have.
Speaker B:And secondly, we should be focusing on let's solve the root cause.
Speaker B:I believe education has an obligation to look for potential in every child, not assume it's going to come out.
Speaker B:Look for it, do whatever it takes to nurture it.
Speaker B:And that's what, you know, that's why I bought a school, because I wanted to prove that education can be far, far better.
Speaker A:So I hope you enjoyed listening to this shorter episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.
Speaker A:I've called it the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Wisdom.
Speaker A:Because I believe there's so much wisdom in the guests that I have on and their insights.
Speaker A:So sometimes we just need that little bit of a reminder.
Speaker A:And I hope that has helped you today and look forward to seeing you back on the brand new episode on Thursday.
Speaker A:Have a good rest of your week.
