An Interview with Virginia Sandford
BrainTrain’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing

1) Virginia, first of all, tell us a bit about yourself and your company.

BrainTrain was founded in 1989 by my husband, Dr. Joseph Sandford, a clinical neuropsychologist. Dr. Sandford began programming computers at the age of 16, and before becoming a psychologist, he worked on the beginnings of the internet as a professional programmer. I have a degree in piano from Juilliard and made my living as a performer and piano teacher for many years before becoming vice president of sales and marketing for BrainTrain. I think maybe being in a performance field gives a person a feel for presenting and marketing products, so that has made it possible for me to make a contribution to our family business. Plus my many years of teaching helped me understand a lot about the learning process. Having helped begin BrainTrain, I have had to learn a great deal about computers, business, marketing, and people, so it has been an invaluable “brain-training” experience for me. I like to tell people that I got my Ph.D. by osmosis!

2) Could you tell us about this almost world famous “Captain’s Log”?

Dr. Sandford got his inspiration for Captain's Log while doing his psychology internship working with head injured adults back in the 1980s. He saw therapists going over repetitive simple cognitive tasks again and again, and with his computer background, he realized that this was something that a computer is perfectly suited for. He wrote the first twenty-one programs for the Apple II+ computer on 5-1/4" floppy disks. While clinicians were fairly quick to perceive the value of the programs, it was a few years before the research was done that corroborated what they saw happening with their patients. Since the early days, the software has been greatly expanded and updated. It now includes fifty programs for the PC, plus utilities for creating customized training protocols and evaluating progress.

The software is not just “almost” world famous! It is actually used in forty-four foreign countries, as well as in all fifty states of the US.

3) What kinds of people would benefit from Captain’s Log?

The lowest level tasks in Captain's Log would be appropriate for a head-injured person who is barely cognizant; it requires the user to respond with a mouse click to very simple stimuli. The highest level tasks are challenging to a normal adult and in fact can be used for peak performance training to improve the thinking skills and processing speed of almost anyone. The unique benefit of the system is that it covers all of the ground between these two ends of the spectrum of abilities and provides a structured hierarchy to help each individual user to systematically improve cognitive functioning. Captain's Log places an entire library of multi-level cognitive training exercises at your fingertips.

Captain's Log is most commonly used by people ages 5 through adult with ADHD, head injuries, autism, and various kinds of learning disabilities. To effect meaningful and long-lasting change requires consistent, steadfast practice over a period of twenty to forty hours of training. This is why a school setting is the perfect vehicle for these programs. Working at these tasks every day develops one’s learning abilities.

Research has shown that children with reading disabilities combined with attention problems don’t respond well even to intense one-on-one tutoring. They need to learn the basic cognitive skill of paying attention before they can effectively learn academic material. When I talk with professionals who work in special education, they agree pretty much unanimously that kids need to develop the cognitive skills necessary for learning before academic learning can take place. Force-feeding them academic knowledge without helping them to develop the cognitive bases for learning is often an exercise in futility. If they aren’t paying attention, how can they learn?

The Captain's Log system is based on the concept of brain plasticity, also called neurogenesis. This is the ability of the brain to “rise to the occasion,” to develop the abilities needed to meet the challenges presented to it. As Ronald Kotulak said in his wonderful book, Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works, (Andrews McMeel, 1997), “the brain gets better and better through exercise but 'rusts' with disuse. It is the ultimate use-it-or-lose-it machine." This is easy to see in babies; babies who are talked to, played with, cuddled, and stimulated with colors, shapes and music thrive, and babies who lie in a crib all day with no stimulation often end up being developmentally delayed. In fact, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine found that children who don’t play much or are rarely touched develop brains 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age (“Fertile Minds”, J. Madeleine Nash, Time.com, February 3, 1997.)

The same principle applies to human beings in general. Stimulating our brains with interesting challenging activities makes us “smarter” and happier.

4) What kinds of training does one need to use it? Or is it self-explanatory?

Each Captain's Log program has a wonderful help file to aid the user. There is also a “wizard” for setting up an appropriate training plan. Many clinicians and teachers achieve significant success with the programs just by using these tools and experimenting on their own.

That being said, even professionals who are familiar with Captain's Log, are often “blown away” by the power of the system when they come to our training workshops and learn what it is really capable of.

5) What skills seem to be easiest to rehabilitate?

Research has shown that cognitive training leads to changes in the structure and chemistry of the brain. Most important, it improves frontal lobe or executive functioning ability.

Currently the most exciting research results are in the area of working memory, the ability to remember something while you work with it. (Examples would be doing math in your head or having someone give you a set of driving instructions while you are in the process of driving to a destination.) Developing working memory generalizes to executive functioning – response inhibition, complex reasoning, and reduced inattention and hyperactivity in ADHD children (Klingberg, et al, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 2005 Feb;44(2):177-86.) The fifteen newest programs in Captain’s Log contain 675 different working memory exercises. We think they are the best yet!

Another of the skills addressed by the system is response inhibition. I have been told by a great many people that the software has been instrumental in changing their head injured clients’ or their ADHD students’ lives by teaching them to be patient and to wait their turn.

Once students discover that they can be successful in cognitive skill building, they often develop much higher self-esteem. This, in turn, gives them the basis for believing that learning can be fun and that they can be good at it. This is a life-changing discovery for these individuals, as you can imagine.

6) Do you have a web site where people can learn more about your products and the required training?

Our website URL is www.braintrain.com.

7) How often are the trainings offered and where ?

One of the most exciting packages we offer for schools is what we call our IEP – “Innovative Educators’ Package.” This provides a school district with twenty-five stations of Captain's Log to be distributed as they wish to the various schools in the district and includes a two-day on-site teacher training workshop taught by Dr. Sandford.

We offer hands-on training workshops for professionals (psychologists, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, educators) about six times per year near our main office in Richmond, VA. For these workshops, we provide each team of participants with a laptop so they can learn by doing.

In addition, we offer what we call “comprehensive” workshops one or two times per year in various locations around the country. These workshops, also for professionals, are a bit less detailed than the hands-on workshops, but they cover more ground – not only our cognitive training software, but also our neurofeedback system, SmartMind, and our ADHD tests, the IVA+Plus and IVA-AE. We have done these in Monterey, Toronto, Williamsburg, Chicago, San Antonio, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

People who want to know about our professional training workshops should check back on our website periodically or put themselves on our mailing list by calling us at 1-800-822-0538, or by e-mailing info@braintrain.com.

8) Can parents get the software to help their children with memory or attention?

There is a very reasonably priced home version of our software. While this is available directly to home users for purchase on our website, we highly recommend that they go through their therapist or school to acquire it. A professional provider is in a better position to determine what therapeutic or educational interventions would be best for any individual and to structure them for that individual. Often, providers make Captain's Log available for use in conjunction with other programs and structured therapeutic support for maximum effectiveness. Trained Captain's Log providers can customize training protocols for use at home by their clients. We consider this to be the ideal approach for maximizing a person’s success using the Captain's Log system.