GATE programs are tailored to provide gifted students with an advanced curriculum. They may involve cluster grouping, specialized classes, pull-out programs, or magnet schools for profoundly gifted pupils.
Blocked learning gates can severely hinder children’s development and behavior. There can be several causes behind barred learning gates, including:-.
Focus & Attention
Attention and focus are integral to brain functioning, allowing us to direct our conscious minds toward specific sensory stimuli such as sound, touch, smell, sight, or internal thoughts and feelings. Once signaled by our conscious minds, they are sent to working memory for detailed processing before being passed on for eye movement-orienting behaviors like eye blinks. Working memory is integral to learning as it forms our short-term memory stores.
Focused attention refers to maintaining concentration on one task for an extended period without becoming distracted, which is essential for learning but often complex in today’s technological environment filled with distractions like social media, television shows, computers, and smartphones.
Hermann von Helmholtz developed a theory called the division of attention that describes how humans can focus on one stimulus while disregarding similar stimuli co-occurring. This concept gives us greater insight into why children struggle to perform daily tasks.
For example, children may struggle with reading or writing when the learning gate for focused attention is blocked. Reading text while not processing it correctly or quickly enough can leave them easily fatigued after short amounts of time, potentially becoming frustrated and tired of working at what is sometimes mundane work.
Attention & Behaviour
Attention is the ability to selectively process information in our environments while filtering out unrelated stimuli. Due to its limited capacity and duration, attention must be managed strategically to optimize its use during various task contexts, such as selectivity, divided attention, or switching attention.
Vigilance or concentration refers to the ability to focus intently on one aspect of an environment while disregarding another, usually due to fatigue or stress.
Children with blocked learning gates typically struggle to concentrate and appear disengaged or distracted, often yawning frequently or quickly becoming fatigued when performing school work such as writing, reading, or spelling assignments. It isn’t uncommon for these kids to suffer from dysgraphia – a condition affecting writing and penmanship skills – as well.
At each point during the experiment, participants saw icons cued during their learning task (a relevant icon and distractor) or that hadn’t (redundant icons and non-cued distractor). We observed that reward provision during mapping significantly decreased reaction times in probe tasks for attending to relevant icons, supporting theories suggesting reward and attention jointly facilitate plasticity in learning.
Auditory Processing
Children suffering from an impaired Auditory Processing Gate often struggle to hear subtle differences in similar sounds or words, hindering their ability to map these sounds into long-term memory – the cornerstone of fluent reading. Dyslexia is one of the more prominent symptoms, yet these learning gates also impact a child’s ability to follow oral directions or even recognize themselves when spoken aloud – showing dramatic improvement when supplementation therapies such as nutrition therapy, gut healing, and movement therapies like brain integration therapy are used together.
Correcting this gate can be the most time-consuming and challenging aspect of schoolwork for any child, but it can have dramatic impacts once converted successfully. Reversals often vanish; notes become easier to take in class; spelling and handwriting become simpler; motor skills like catching a ball or riding a bike improve, as does socialization in style; I refer to this process as “removing the block between their head and their hands,” since once fixed this will open up so many other aspects of their lives.
Visual Processing
Visual Processing is the ability to interpret, recognize, and comprehend what one sees. Difficulties in this area often cause learning disabilities. Visual processing encompasses visual discrimination, memory retention, spatial relationships, and motor integration – using feedback from the eyes to coordinate the movement of other body parts.
Researchers have demonstrated that visual perception requires two distinct goals in isolation: identifying an object’s identity (what) and localizing its location in space. The former goal can be accomplished using feedforward mechanisms, while top-down influences help modulate how neurons respond dynamically.
Research evidence shows that the early stages of visual cortical processing are driven by rapid, recurrent modulations, which tailor neural representations before feedforward processes such as attentional feedforward processes can access them. This emerging view of visual processing resembles a countercurrent stream model of awareness with top-down anticipatory influences dynamically altering lower-level neuron filters, thereby shaping representations of objects as whole objects.
Children who experience blocked learning gates struggle in one or more areas, such as visual discrimination, spatial relationships, and visual memory. They may learn more efficiently if these learning gates can be opened through nutrition therapy, gut healing, or movement therapies like Brain Integration Therapy.
