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Most people
have experienced the consequences of a bottleneck. For example,
when you are on the Internet and there is a slow response,
there’s a good chance this is caused by a capacity bottleneck.
To explain
what a bottleneck is, let’s move from the complex world of
computers to one most motorists are very familiar with: traffic
jams. As too many cars enter the freeway, the capacity limit of
the freeway is exceeded and a traffic jam occurs. In other
words, a capacity bottleneck is in effect. Add rain and it takes
fewer cars to create a traffic jam. Other causes of bottlenecks
are accidents or road work. They can also be caused indirectly
if another freeway develops a traffic jam, causing the
alternative freeway to exceed its capacity as many drivers take
the alternate route.
On the other
hand, there is the brain. Here, it’s information that enters the
brain – information that demands to be processed and wants to be
stored so it is available for future use. It makes sense that
pathways are needed to connect the different parts of the brain.
As with a freeway, it can be assumed that these pathways have a
limited capacity, although that capacity grows, particularly
during childhood.
Let’s look at
history for a moment. It is reasonable to assume that over the
past 100,000 years, the amount of differing information
that entered the human brain was relatively stable. This changed
drastically over the past decades, particularly the last 10 to
20 years. It happened through school, television, the Internet,
travel and other things. Shouldn’t it normally take many
generations before nature is able to cope with such drastic
change? It is reasonable to assume that such a change can have
negative implications. In support of this, there is a study that
suggests a link between very young children watching too much TV
and autism. (See “Remarkable
Treatments & Results.”)
A prediction emerges from this and from wider experiences:
When a
capacity bottleneck is the problem, it doesn’t matter what data is reduced, as long as the reduced
data is part of what is causing the bottleneck. Consequently,
therapies which, at first glance, have nothing to do with
dyslexia or ADHD become interesting treatment options.
When looking
into dyslexia – and provided the capacity bottleneck prediction
is a decent representation of what is going on in the brain – it
can be assumed the bottleneck exists before the child learns to
read. As the child tries to learn to read, increasing pressure
is put on the bottleneck. It further implies that a
reading-based treatment for the problem would be like trying to
resolve a traffic jam by adding more horsepower to the cars. In
such a case, the unexpected or “surprise” treatments are more
likely to lead to success.
One of the
techniques applied by a therapy listed on this site is similar
to changing a few signs along the freeway to relieve some of the
traffic. Such a change could cause many cars to use the
underutilized alternative freeway to get from A to B, enabling
the traffic on both freeways to run smoothly.
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