How to Train the Trainer of the Brain

Wynford Dore

Thank you, Cheng. I’m excited too, from what I’ve heard about you, I’m eager to get going, I’m sure none of it’s true. Well, some think it’s too good to be true until they see the results. We’ll come to that later.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Yeah, exactly, and that’s actually brings us to the very first point. So um you know, let’s let’s talk about something, let’s talk about some breakthroughs in neuroscience over the last few decades that people don’t know about and technology has allowed people to access to. So um what do you think those are and how can people benefit from understanding this?

Wynford Dore

I will never understand why the cerebellum has been so misunderstood, but until about 30 years ago, nobody was even thinking about it. They knew what it was doing, they got it completely worked out and it was being ignored. Professor in England, Professor Rob Nicholson. He started saying, do you know what, it’s doing an awful lot more than we think, and he started to explain its real role. And then that work was picked up by Professor Sh Marmon in Harvard Medical School. And he took it a lot deeper. He got the resources to do all sorts of amazing studies and his name is well known and His papers, you know, it took him 10 years before anybody would start publishing research from Harvard Medical School. So you can see that there’s an awful lot, there’s an awful lot of resistance to this very subject coming up. So 20 years ago, I was predicting that, you know, by the 2020 then almost every university would have a professor focusing totally on the cerebellum. It’s that important that hasn’t happened in the number of papers are, are exploding in number. So it’s there’s a there’s a real, there’s a real upward trend in that, but the information still isn’t generally known and it certainly isn’t reaching the people that needed the healthcare providers, the doctors and certainly not the patients yet, we’ve got to change that.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Well, you know, this is what I learned in medical school. So we’re talking about the cerebellum, which is, it’s kind of its own low baby will of the brain just at the base of the head right here and in medical school, I mean when I did neuroscience and I taught neuroscience in medical school, you know what we thought the cerebellum main function was was just balance was the ability to create balance and and understand where things are in the body. And so um but that’s that’s that’s changed quite a bit. Uh Well I shouldn’t say it’s changed quite a bit. I don’t think it was taught to me because I didn’t go to Mexico that long ago, you know, so I don’t think I was taught to me in a way that I understood it now, is that this portion of the brain, although it’s kind of kind of secluded by itself is not just about balance, it kind of ties into all the other areas of the brain that that that that create functionality of what other we do something, whether we don’t do something. And so even people who have had insults to other brain, let’s call them, you know, strokes or damaged or mini strokes or something like that or parking or anything like that. There’s still a need to create balance within the cerebellum, even though that’s not like the one area that’s really affected. So that that concept is new to me, right? And so let’s expand that upon a little bit. So, you know, the cerebellum is sort of this um uh it’s a connector, right? And I used to think, oh the master connectors in other parts of the brain called the hypothalamus. The cerebellum is his own connector now. Um this is if I, even if I talked to my colleagues and friends, this is not well known in the general medical field. Um and so what is it about? Why is it that no one wants to talk about this as you said, you were predicted by 2020 you know, people, medical institutions teaching about the cerebellum, what it does, like why hasn’t it gotten that way?

Wynford Dore

I do not know Cheng, it’s puzzling me, but let’s let’s just touch a bit on, on what the cerebellum does that we now know. It does, it is, it is the Master Integrator, not just of our senses, which it does very well, but that’s according to mormon, that’s only about a quarter of its overall role. The vast majority of the cerebellum is involved with integrating and learning every process that we have, not just cognitive, not just balance and coordination but emotional controls and so on. So there’s a wonderful paper by shaman, I think in 1995 that’s really worth reading because because that is just not reaching people. So what does it do when, when whatever process we, we try to learn the cerebellum gets that information, it starts to develop a like a computer program and it and it develops that computer program by by checking how effective it is. And whenever there’s errors in that process, that feedback information triggers fine tuning the triggers the debugging if you like. And that debugging eventually leads to a perfect program. So whether it’s whether it is something, balance and coordination, riding a bike walking or whether it’s some skill that involves socializing, so that the development of of finely tuned social skills, the cerebellum is what has, gets the feedback loop, did what you were trying to do actually happen or did something go wrong and if it did go wrong, it goes back in and adjust that. So the cerebellum has got things like an internal model that’s pictures of what did it look like when you carry out any function or skill or process. And it’s got an inverse model which is what steps does the brain need to take. So it’s like a very all of our processes are actually hardwired into a very sophisticated program and the cerebellum is always fine tuning it. But the problem is some skills hit a glass ceiling, so some people are never any good at dancing, Some are never any good at public speaking, some are never never any good at reading, Some are not very good at concentration, paying attention and so on. There’s any number of skills that we don’t fully developed because the cerebellum development process has hit a glass ceiling and that’s where limitations in our in our in our in our whole existence actually start to to show themselves,

Cheng Ruan, MD

you know, that that makes sense to me, but kind of goes against a lot of things that I’ve learned, right, and it goes against the fact that whenever one area of the brain is affected, we gotta fix the one particular area, you know? Uh and and that’s not necessarily true. Um And it’s because it’s um the brain is is more holistic than we think it is, right? And so there’s different parts modulating it connections and this several cerebellum is part of the whole deal. Now this makes sense if I was, let’s say, a physical therapist because there’s cerebellum training in vestibular training in physical therapy of post stroke patients, that we know that there’s actually a significant improvement in your cognition functionality and stuff like that. So that so that part makes sense. But I always thought it was indirect, I always thought that hey, people get physical therapy and they feel fitter and there’s more engagements and there’s an indirect metabolic marker metabolic factor on the brain. But I didn’t realize there was more of a direct market, especially when you do a lot of these balances training. So, that’s my original, I guess limiting belief, but but now I know a little better.

Wynford Dore

Well let me just touch on that chain for a second. Physical exercise per se does good. But it often fades away. The good disappears because we might have produced a few extra good positive chemicals in the brain. But they dissipate the difference is understanding how the cerebellum can itself be developed. And if you look at the research and some wonderful research showing that when you stimulate the cerebellum using vestibular activity, that’s when plasticity in the cerebellum in and according to nature, that’s when stem cells are created. So there are things you can now do to literally increase the density of gray matter in the cerebellum. Now, one big fact about the cerebellum that until Harvard Medical School worked it out. Not many people realize that the cerebellum is only 10% by volume, but it’s 75%, 3 quarters of all our brain cells, Sharman calls it the brain within the brain. It doesn’t get more exciting and important than that.

Cheng Ruan, MD

The mitochondria of the brain. That’s very interesting. It is the brain within the brain. And so um now people are kind of watching this. I was like, wow, this is um first of all this, what we’re talking about today, even if you’re a doctor watching this, there’s there’s a lot of myths is being dispelled, but we’re talking about data from a from a public point of view is that there’s a way to improve brain function and the key. Maybe in the cerebellum, correct? 

Wynford Dore

Absolutely. You know, and the wonderful thing about the cerebellum is it’s very different to the hippocampus, the hippocampus is greater being the librarian for whatever we want to remember into our thinking brain. So what names, dates, pictures in our mind and and facts and numbers and so on. Anything that we recall to our thinking brain uses the hippocampus. Hippocampus typically only stimulates about 10% of our brain, whereas when you learn something through the cerebellum, it lasts, you know, remembering remembering how to spell Cheng Ruan is something that I’ve got clearly in my mind right now. But if if I don’t speak to you for the next three years, I hope we do. But if I don’t that might well be fading. But the cerebellum is different when the cerebellum integrates all of the senses that are happening to you. When you’re learning that particular process or skill, The cerebellum creates permanent change. So when we learn to ride a bike we get to a point where we stop thinking about it and we’ve got it automatically hard. The cerebellum has done that job. I actually put my bike away for over 20 years when I pulled it out of the shed, I dusted it down, pump the tires up and I rode the cerebellum is work had not faded one scrap. So that’s the wonderful thing about the cerebellum and it also it involves about 90% of the brain when the cerebellum is doing learning. So to me it’s it’s the exciting to learn and develop.

Cheng Ruan, MD

So this thing called muscle memory’s not even within the muscles, within the cerebellum processes, right?

Wynford Dore

That various, that’s what I believe and the theory about 10,000 hours of learning, that’s a very, very shallow approach to what the cerebellum is really doing.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Wow, that’s that amazing concept. How did you even stumble into this and how did you start working with neuroscientists in the first place? What’s your story?

Wynford Dore

I’m a researcher. So I, my each of my businesses have been involved with researching completely new approaches to an industry. I did it in the fire protection industry. I worked on technology that some people are saying would have kept the World Trade Centers up. I don’t make that claim that I’ve heard lots of others make that claim. That was my first industry. But during that time, my oldest daughter, I’ve got four Children. My oldest daughter had the same teachers as my other Children, worked just as hard as the same support at home and could not learn until the age of five or six. She seemed very, very bright. Then she went to school and learning was hard work, in fact, it was impossible for us. So she left school, still not reading four letter words. And as is often the case with Children struggle with learning. She became more and more depressed. So one day I was driving my car up in the north of England and I got a phone call. The kind of phone call you never ever want to get. And that was from my younger daughter saying Suzy is in hospital. She’s tried to take her life. I was, my mind just went blank and I started to say what’s the chances, what’s happening? And the phone had gone dead. 

My younger daughter had gone back to her bedside. So I had the two hour drive home working out What else could I want, What have I done wrong? What advice did I ignore that level of guilt, as you can imagine, you know that I was a successful businessman driving around in a nice car with all the toys of success. But a daughter that wasn’t happy and on that journey I made the decision that I was going to sell my business is I was going to put all my time and money and resources into finding out why Suzie couldn’t learn well. I got to the hospital and thank God Susie was beginning to come around and they said there was a good chance we’re going to save her life. But it changed my life. So that’s when I started and I started, you know, I started looking for where are the clues? What is everybody missing? And one thing led to another. And I got introduced to Professor Rod Nicholson who became my mentor and he’s my mentor to this day. My previous phone call to this conversation was with Professor Rod Nicholson? He’s a humble guy, but an incredibly bright guy. And he’s still, his work is still not being recognized except by those that are benefiting from it. And this tens of thousands of those, fortunately.

Cheng Ruan, MD

So this is all for Susie, 

Wynford Dore

this is all. But as soon as I started Cheng, as soon as I started putting some some programs together that was following what Professor Nicholson was telling me and I started looking for others who wanted to take this risk. And suddenly there was a queue outside the door of people said, oh my child can’t read, my child, can’t concentrate, My child’s got low self esteem. And so I had to keep going back to the neuroscientists, what’s happening here, let’s get an understanding of that. And I bought some equipment from Nasa, which Nasa used to work out why astronauts sometimes when they leave the Earth’s gravitational pull, they start to see things upside down and read their writing is backwards and all sorts of things go wrong. And I started then to realize the sensitivity of the brain to the function of the vestibular system. And rob Nicholson had already pointed me to the cerebellum. So I started putting together all these pieces of jigsaw and within months Susie was reading for the first time in her life,

Cheng Ruan, MD

Wow, wow! Well, now let’s talk about what this system is? Let’s go, let’s dive people. So what, so what did you build 

Wynford Dore

When I ended up working with about 45,000 people with reading difficulties and concentration difficulties. And there were some amazing common denominators. About 97% of them had very poor eye tracking, very poor. So instead of their eyes smoothly going along the line, when you take a video of their eye movements, their eyes are jumping around. So guess what the all the letters and words are going in in a scrambled way. Nothing to do with how intelligent they are but is to do with how the skill of eye movement that fine motor skill has never developed. It hit a glass ceiling. And so reading for them is hard work. Well, we then developed a way of putting vestibular stimulation together with other exercises that challenge the cerebellum simultaneously. And that started to do the trick. It started to drive the ongoing development of the cerebellum which is itself the natural, the normal way that the brain acquires and develops and fine tunes skills. 

So when you start from the problem and you start from the skill deficit end and give more exercises, it really does any good because the cerebellum can’t turn it into a properly developed program. But when you develop the cerebellum where the problem the root cause of the problem is it can naturally fully continue the development and that’s and that’s what happened. So we started off with, we started off with eye tracking and we’ve quickly found that auditory processing was the same you know those. And then we then we discovered that movement is what we call dispatch xia is the same issue. It’s incomplete development of that part of the cerebellum that fine tunes coordination and balance and coordination. So we were we were finding ways of systematically doing an audit on where is the cerebellum doing a good job, where is it not? How can we stimulate that? So that development continues to the point where it can complete all of that type of skill that that part of the cerebellum is responsible for this.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Sounds like my childhood to be honest. So I don’t talk about this very much. But um when I was in china I was born in china. Um and I was starting and I came in the middle of my of my first grade to the U. S. And what I realized is that I was good at reading in Chinese which is a uniform language right? Which means there’s no letters in a row. It’s a picture and then English was so hard, I can speak it very well. My pronunciation was pretty good, lost by a Chinese accent like 33 months, you know. But I was I was able to speak it very well. I’m a phonetic learner but my gosh whenever you put words together uh in any sort of English language. Latin language whatever the sequential. Um That gives me palpitations thinking back on it because it was very hard and I didn’t do very well in school because of it and uh and it was very depressing for me because I just I just thought something was wrong with me, right? And uh and that got worse after I started to play um soccer um and uh and and I had concussions and they got worse later on when they got more concussions in American football, and then I got more concussions one time in baseball and then it just kind of got worse and worse and worse and part of the and the only thing that would really allow me to to really focus on something were my Chinese medicine balls, I had both hands, there’s two balls, I start coordinating myself and then uh it was very fidgety and I’m able to kind of concentrate on things and then I have to like have to be very specific on these words. So even today if you send me a paragraph and text message, I have to like cover it up to to figure out what each line says sometimes and that’s me, you know, being a physician, thank God medical school, most of it was auditory learning from me. And so it wasn’t a very good, very good test taker, but that kind of makes makes makes sense of some things, you know, for me and uh and you know, my balance isn’t great uh and my several actions. It’s currently still isn’t isn’t great. It was much better than it was before. But that really that this this this whole thing kind of kind of hits home for me, you know, 

Wynford Dore

But are you- do you do rollerblading or?

Cheng Ruan, MD

I did yeah

Wynford Dore

So you might say you just said your balance is not very good. So why did I ask you why did you do rollerblading? Because often people with with reading struggles often not always often they’re very good at skiing, rollerblading, windsurfing snowboarding. So what’s going on? Well, shall I try and explain that? And also why reading is hard work for you. And I must preface this by saying the most interesting people in this world often have A. D. H. D. The most interesting people are often poor readers and I’ve come across quite a few billionaires and I don’t think I’ve found one yet that does a lot of reading because it’s hard work for them. So what’s going on? You know, our education system is not discovering intelligence. That’s a whole another story and that’s one of my other patterns I own a private school very excited about because I know that education can and should be far better than it. But let’s get back to those two things. So your balance. You’re very good at snowboarding boys. Most people say that’s awesome balance. So what’s going on? Well, you know that blind people very often have far better auditory processing. 

They’re far more sensitive to sounds in your case, I mean there’s three elements to balance. One is what we see, Another is the vestibular function and the third is the somatosensory feelings through the body. Well, if your vestibular information is not being used by the brain to the extent it should be because the connections aren’t there, then your vestibular system becomes far more highly tuned. So guess what you need for for for snowboarding, you need fantastic feelings through your whole somatosensory system and that’s what you’ve got. So you find snowboarding you probably picked it up quicker than most and you’re probably pretty good and so on. So that’s not because that’s because your vestibular system is underperforming and your somatosensory system has developed far more precision and acuteness. Does that make sense?

Cheng Ruan, MD

That makes sense. Makes sense. I feel better about it now.

Wynford Dore

So what’s happening with reading? If the part of the cerebellum responsible for developing your fine motor skills is itself not fully developed, then you’ll end up with poor fine motor skills, that’s the predominantly eye movement and fingertips. So you may well hold your pen in an unusual way, something a lot of people hold their pen and they just right with their fingertips. That’s a fine motor skill. Those without good fine motor skills, they often hold their pen in a strange way and write with a gross motor skill because the fine motor skill isn’t developed and if we took a video of your eyes reading, Cheng, we’d probably see those jumps and move. So the data is going in in a scrambled way. So this is what happened. The part of the cerebellum responsible for developing and perfecting precision. Fine motor skills isn’t well developed. So you’ve ended up with a poor skill. So what happens is whenever we have a poor skill, the cerebellum hasn’t finished off when we’re using it, we need thinking brain activity to help us make that skill work at all. They call it conscious compensation. And guess what? The thinking brain is far less precise than the program or the process that would have been or should have been developed by the cerebellum. And so if you’ve got thinking brain involvement rather than all of the process of eye movement being controlled up in your cortex, it’s going to be a far less precise and be far slower. 

You know the thinking brain neuroscientists are arguing about this right now. Is the thinking brain 40,000 times slower than the cortex or is it a million times slower? I don’t care. I tend to use a generalization, say around 100,000 times slower. So you’ve got the process that should be happening up here happening here with support from the, from the thinking brain and it’s far less precise. That’s why. So there’s two problems there, your eye tracking is going to be imprecise and second, it’s filling up the very part of the brain which you need to retain the words that you’re reading. So you imagine if your prefrontal cortex is rammed with stuff that shouldn’t be there, you get to the end of the sentence and you realize you haven’t retained the words you have to read it again and sometimes again so because that prefrontal cortex your thinking brain is full of stuff that really shouldn’t be happening. 

There should be happening up here in the cortex unlimited capacity, almost infinite speed. Any any skill you need that need support in here is going to be imprecise very much slower and very tiring of course. So that’s the first stage of what’s happening with reading. The second stage is when your thinking brain is full of stuff that shouldn’t be there. That’s where your executive functions are. So guess what attention is out the window, impulsivity, far more common emotional control sometimes out of the window, impatience and frustration and and so on. Memory functions can sometimes prepared. So you got a horrible double negative happening there. You get the skill impaired and then you get your your executive functions impaired as well. And when you look at all of that you can very soon analyze and understand the root cause of all of the symptoms of dyslexia and A. D. H. D. And even autism they’re all rooted back in the cerebellum not finishing its job and on the implications of that the consequences of that

Cheng Ruan, MD

amazing to tie all that together to, you know, the cerebellum, It’s it’s certainly very unexpected as well. And so, you know, I had a chance to um utilizing performance, which is um the topic that we’re talking about today, but let’s let’s kind of go into zinging performance and what it is because it is cerebellum training, even though the cerebellum training is whole brain training as well. How was that developed? What are the components of it and what can people expect out of it?

Wynford Dore

Well, it developed from trial and error. You know, if you imagine I’ve got a daughter that wanted to die And all of the experts that I’ve taken into said she’s got to learn to live with it and I have to point out she’s just attempted to take her life. It isn’t worth living with. So I just threw everything at it. I ended up at one point with 400 staff therapists, doctors, psychologists, physical therapists, and so on in 57 clinics that I was supporting to do this research. So we had a huge number of samples to work with. And so we we we literally did over a million trials of the impact of individual exercise combinations, but there was always that secret source behind it. It was the combination of vestibular stimulation and there’s various types of that. There’s rotation is jumping up and down from side to side and various degrees of  stimulation, the severity of the vestibular input that has to be combined with an exercise that challenges the cerebellum.

In other words, getting you to do something that you don’t normally do that. 

The cerebellum hasn’t already got a program worked out for. And when you combine those two and you give the right exercises and we have to work with all those people to work out the right combination at each time and then how to move them on. Because as the cerebellum was developing in this process, those particular exercises ceased to have any effect. So we had to increase stimulation and systematically be working through each part of the cerebellum that needed it so that we maximized if we can maximize the development of cerebellum, you maximize the number of connections, synapses that’s going to take place in the brain. And so it was trial and error. Initially, fortunately we never did any harm to anyone. Sometimes in the early days we took them forward slower than what we would today and that was part of the learning process. And so the program there was a time when we needed to bring them to clinics. 

Now we can do most of this online, but we do love working with doctors and healthcare providers because they can do things like the eye tracking tests and in 10 minutes you can show patients exactly what is happening. And suddenly it’s like it is a lightbulb moment and you get wow. And then you get dad who’s always angry saying why has nobody told me this before? We’ve school has been struggling. My child is struggling. Mom’s in tears because she realizes actually it’s not that her child is unintelligent or lazy or had bad teaching or bad parenting. It’s because she’s got a developmental issue that it’s just hit a glass ceiling and now you know, there’s something you can do to get through that glass ceiling. So that that was the history of of where where this the emergence of this chain.

Cheng Ruan, MD

So this this thing that we call A D. D. And A. D. H. D. So it’s really just a label of a pattern that we see and uh human nature and the fact that there’s something to do about it is very inspiring and you’re right. And it is going to be those patients who like why didn’t no one did no one tell me this before. Why didn’t the psychiatrist tell me this before. But I haven’t even heard about it until I started using performance myself. And I’m like what is what is this? And I’m in the brain world. I look at brains all the time. Except I don’t look at the cerebellum because I look at Q. E. G. Which can look at the cerebellum, look at everything but the cerebellum. So I mean this this almost it’s almost like it’s too good to be true. I mean you’ve been working on this what 20 something years now right And why why why haven’t I heard about it before? I guess that’s the best question.

Wynford Dore

Look I can’t answer that. All I know is when I did some some podcast with Dr. Daniel Amen. He started telling me all sorts of stuff and he was telling me things like more than half his patients. They show up with little to no blood flow in the cerebellum. And and he he also told me he doesn’t know any other intervention that directly impacts the development of the cerebellum. There’s drugs there but they don’t deal with the root cause they help you cope with whatever symptoms you’ve got. And they work at the symptom development end and this is working at the root cause end. So why is it not happening? I don’t know. You know we’re doing a lot of research we’re doing peer reviewed studies were just starting a whole range of programs of research programs in school. We’ve just completed a wonderful study in In Nebraska in a school there called West Hold School. And I haven’t got the statistics here because they’ve only just been produced today in those people that were below average in visual working memory auditory, working memory, concentration, response time and so on. We took them up we took them up an average of 30 cent aisles In each of those different categories. So we weren’t practicing those we we were we were looking at who needs the most need and working with them. And then what’s the changes?

Well so in you know auditory working memory which is critical to listening and taking things in. We we took we took people up 43 cent aisles if they were below average when we started you know that’s huge. So when when you’re doing something that changes a whole range of different cognitive measures and we you know we use the traditional cognitive measures that most neuroscientists would use for these things and we transform a whole plethora of them. You know you’re dealing with something very important in the brain.

Cheng Ruan, MD

Why whenever I’m hearing these numbers and these are these are incredible numbers. My mind is actually alone what the data sets show, right? And it’s and it’s um and it’s uh and I’m kind of sad to say I didn’t know about earlier but I do know about now. Um but why do you think what do you think it takes for the world to understand that there is such a thing as training your brain in a specific way for performance, functionality, the attention etcetera etcetera. What what’s that gonna take?

Wynford Dore

I don’t know, we had one massive breakthrough and that was a very famous documentary maker here in Britain, he Trevor Mcdonald his name is he came to us and he sent a load of people to us some of them had no problems, some of them did have problems and he didn’t tell us. Which was which we didn’t know this was happening because they were just turning up at one of the clinics and we our doctors immediately identified those that were not telling the truth about their symptoms and those that had got a genuine problem. We transformed them and change their lives completely. So he was documenting all of this. So when he put his documentary out of course it was very credible. He got he take the credibility box so that that created massive interests with the brief phone system over here crashed because there was so many people trying to trying to contact us. So if somebody has got great credibility that works well bring it forward to today. 

You may have heard of Dr. Ned Hallowell who is the famous author of of books. Well I worked with him with his son and his wife some 14 or 15 years ago. So he’s been watching my research ever since. Well you’ve got to read his last two books to see what he is now saying about this because not only is he witnessed it in his own family he’s we’re now witnessing it with lots of his clients. Well there’s not many as as prominent and famous as him in the Hole A. D. H. D. World. He’s he’s a guy that sold five million books on a. D. H. D. He has now come around to the fact that the the best way to provide a medication free intervention is to use exactly a program like this which stimulates the vestibular challenges the cerebellum with another exercise and deal with the root cause that the the limitation to the development of the key skills which transforms our lives and makes everything easier.

Cheng Ruan, MD

It’s amazing. And right now this this program is available digitally online access it right away. And that’s that’s the beauty of this right? It’s um it’s not only not like people take action on it and start right away but the outcomes are just it just sounds very amazing. So I want to congratulate you on that.

Wynford Dore

Thank you Cheng. Well look, you know where my heart is, my heart comes from wanting to help my daughter. I just do not want other families to face the same same problems. So when I launched this I decided people don’t know what’s going to happen and and they’ve been told all sorts of confusing things. So I put in place at the beginning if this doesn’t work for you you get your money back. Now, I don’t know of any other medical intervention which has a money back guarantee if it doesn’t produce any positive benefit. And yet this does because to me this is not a business. This is about families not facing not ever getting that phone call that I had when I was on that journey. And I’ve read it ever since. Having the same phone call again. So that’s my driver. Unfortunately, I’ve been able to sit on the shoulders of giants, neuroscientists who have been helping me with different pieces of jigsaw. And when you put it all together. Yeah, it is a picture that looks too good to be true, but it’s not. But until you face it, until you realize it, until you see your own performance being transformed, it is hard to believe.

Cheng Ruan, MD

That’s amazing. Now let me ask you this. Um, and this comes from the old scene, is it to um, is it too late to train old dogs and new tricks, right? Basically is their age limitation where this doesn’t necessarily work anymore.

Wynford Dore

I used to think that I used to think exactly that at least we thought, oh yeah, plasticity runs out. You know, during your teens it’s lying down and so on. And I was giving a talk in Southampton in England one day and a lady came up to me from the second row. An old lady and she said, I want to read and write before I die. I said how old I am 82. I said, well, you know, this is an exercise program. She said, stop, let me stop you there. I know you’re going to tell me that I might hurt myself Because it’s an exercise program. Well, let me tell you I am hurt more every day because the very thing that everyone else finds easy, I find impossible. Will you let me. So I said, Okay, I said, I can’t promise anything. I’ve never dealt with anybody over 70 before. And off she went. Four months later, she was on British national television holding up the first letter she’d ever written in her life.

Cheng Ruan, MD

That’s amazing.

Wynford Dore

Two years later, her daughter rang me, she said do you remember Liz Percy? I said, yeah, how is she? Oh, she’s reading and writing in three languages.

Cheng Ruan, MD

What? so the answer is yeah she can teach

Wynford Dore

And that’s what the Nature article says is that if you combine vestibular stimulation with something that challenges the cerebellum, you multiply stem cells in the cerebellum. And if you keep that up for six weeks, those stem cells become vital new circuits in the cerebellum. So, you know that that that that just came out a couple of years ago 

Cheng Ruan, MD

about that for a second because I read the nature article right before I got on with you. And can you just summarize what I actually found? Because this is a very fascinating article.

Wynford Dore

Well, it was it was it’s a couple of years since I read it now. But so you can probably say more about it than I can. But it was using rats. And it was it was it was showing that if you give rats a challenge, a serious challenge that they needed to solve to to survive. And they were stimulating their vestibular at the same time. That combination, they showed multiplies stem cells in in specific parts of the cerebellum and that was kind of a breakthrough. Does it work in humans? Well, it seems to, and most things like this do translate to working in humans. So, so you know, we see it happening every day.

Cheng Ruan, MD

What are your some of your your favorite success story you just told one? But what are some of your other favorite successful that you think back as like man, this is totally worth, it is the most rewarding thing I’ve done. What are some of those?

Wynford Dore

I have to watch videos and read messages every day from people who are transformed and sometimes it’s from things that happened years ago. I’ll share one with you. Uh an old elderly gentleman in his seventies contacted me, But this was 15 years ago and he said, I’m afraid to get old because my son is very autistic and he can’t look after himself, he doesn’t speak. He just follows us around, very shy, can’t dress himself and so on. Well cut a long story short a year later, he rung me up to say my son has just gone off to London on his own. He goes to see his sister in London. He’s got himself a job. He’s doing something in college and he said life is very different. We’re not scared to get old. Well, I had an update from him only about six weeks ago to tell me that his son was now living in sheltered accommodation. Had we taken away every problem. No, but we’ve got him to a point where he was able to have a life, he was able to look after himself in an apartment and he got friends and he got a social life and that was a thrill. And this guy was saying my wife has just passed and I know she passed happy because my son was in a better place than ever she thought possible. So that’s one of my favorite stories. The fact that my daughter is alive and well and can read and write and communicates by reading and writing all the time is a thrill. The fact that she’s alive is a thrill because I do know that without what Professor Nicholson and Jeremy Schmahmann had shown me that would not be the case.

Cheng Ruan, MD

What an amazing impact you have. So once again for those listening, just look up zing performance, um Z I N G performance right?

Wynford Dore

The zingperformance.com

Cheng Ruan, MD

And one last question before we jump off and this might be more of a personal one is um what do you what do you what do you learn recently that you wish you knew when you started this entire journey? What is one thing 

Wynford Dore

probably the most important thing I had to learn was that that many academic academics are very, very powerful and very wise and very unselfish, but sometimes you get academics that are wedded to some theory they’ve been promoting and their concern is not the Children that are suffering. Their concern is their own reputation and financial standing and so on. So I’ve come across some academics wedded to outdated theories who have been unbelievably nasty in this, not they’re not interested in the science, they are interested in the people. This could help, they’re interested in their own reputation, fortunately, it’s only some but the harm they have done by proactively attacking this breakthrough and, you know, we know that paradigm shifts are always a pain, but, you know, the one of the academics that furiously attacked me, her work has just recently been rubbished. But you know what a generation of Children have suffered needlessly because of the influence of that one academic. So I wish I’d known that I’d have probably approach things in a different way. I am determined. Cheng that another generation will not suffer needlessly. 

How will I get there? I don’t know. But if you’ve got any doctors or healthcare providers listening, you know, get them to contact me because I will make sure that if they’ve got somebody in their family who could benefit, I want them to watch it because when they watch it because they will learn along the way, an awful lot about the cerebellum and its proper role and how it can be developed. I know they then we’ll want to introduce this to their own patients. So I’m not saying, you know, become a zing advocate, I’m saying what what happens for yourself and we’ll make sure they get, you know, we don’t make money at this, but we’ll make sure they get a serious discount attempt them and they can watch it in their own family or friends or maybe a member of staff and when they’ve seen it then they can come back to us and say look, we’d like to put this in our clinic. So that’s my invitation to you.

Cheng Ruan, MD

That’s amazing. Well thank you for that invitation and what a passion discussion. And I have three daughters by the way. So, you know, I get a little choked up whenever you’re talking about yours, so I can understand that and they’re very, very young. Um but listen, I want to thank you so much for coming on today and discussing this and this is gonna be reverberated into hundreds of thousands of of of, of ears. Um and not only that, I think that you’re passionate also shines through on this interview and I really want to applaud you for that as well. So thank you 

Wynford Dore

Cheng, thank you for sharing this great information.