In addition to working with students with learning disabilities, attention deficits, and other learning struggles, Innovative Learning Professionals also provides outpatient cognitive rehabilitation services to those with brain injuries (but not requiring ongoing medical intervention). Brain injuries can occur in many different ways, the most common including blows to the head (such as in car or other accidents), strokes, oxygen deprivation (such as during a heart attack or drowning), and penetrating objects (such as a bullet). For those who live through a brain injury, the consequences can be quite varied. Consequences can include deficits in varying degrees of severity in movement, speech and language (expressive or receptive), emotional control, and other cognitive functions (such as attention, visual processing, auditory processing, memory, reasoning/problem solving and executive functions).

Cognitive rehabilitation is the therapeutic process of increasing an individual's capacity to process and use incoming information so as to increase functioning in everyday life. This includes not only methods aimed at improving cognitive function but also techniques to compensate for deficits that have not been recovered, but does not include the spontaneous recovery of function that occurs after a brain injury. It is a field born primarily out of neuropsychology, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, and special education with growth also spurred by advances in computer software applications. Typically cognitive rehab focuses on the retraining of attention, visual processing, language (although speech and language specialists do much of this direct work), memory, reasoning, problem solving, and executive functions.

Cognitive rehabilitation exercises require the repetitive use of the impaired cognitive system in a graded, progressively more demanding sequence which teaches the brain in a systematic way how to process information more effectively. Such recovery of functioning is presumed to occur in a number of ways which include increased growth in the connections between the brain's neurons (nerve cells) and the brain substituting a different part to carry out a function previously done by the damaged portion. This results in remediation of specifically targeted cognitive processes. When remediation is not complete, it also promotes the development of compensatory processes.

Innovative Learning Professionals uses a variety of exercises to promote increased functioning, some of which are the same ones used with developmental learning problems. In addition, the [Psychological Software Services] PSS CogReHab computer program forms the basis of many of the exercises used to progressively encourage cognitive growth. It contains several distinct exercises (each in successive difficulty) including basic attention and executive skills (e.g., focusing, shifting attention, dividing attention, initiation, inhibition, visual motor coordination), visual-spatial processing (e.g., visual perception, visual analysis, mental imagery), memory (especially as related to sorting and retaining information to make it more accessible), and problem solving (including logical thinking and deduction). These same programs can also be used with those with learning problems that did not originate with a traumatic brain injury. For more information on the software, visit

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