Cognitive Rehabilitation

What is cognitive rehabilitation? 

Cognitive rehabilitation is a type of focused rehabilitation for individuals who have experienced a change in their thinking skills, memory, or attention. It is provided by speech-language pathologists who have expertise in language, thinking skills, attention, memory, executive functions, and instructional techniques for those who learn differently. Cognitive rehabilitation is usually recommended for those with new injuries or disorders like post-concussion syndrome, concussion recovery, mTBI, traumatic brain injury, stroke, new onset of memory problems due to surgeries, medications, tumors,  or cancers.  

Who could benefit from cognitive rehabilitation? 

Cognitive rehabilitation is recommended for individuals whose functioning has been altered as a result of injury or illness. The WHO-ICF (2008) model of disability helps us understand that we are ALL on a continuum of health, sometimes we are able to participate in valued activities, and sometimes we are not. Cognitive rehabilitation focuses on the thinking skills required to live your life. That can mean, learning a new memory strategy so you remember to get everything at the store,  optimizing your organizational skills to stop losing stuff, improving your listening skills so you can follow a group conversation at dinner, increasing your thinking speed so you can call the plays when coaching your kids' soccer games, or enhancing your reasoning skills so you can actively participate in the high stakes meeting at work. 

What will I do in cognitive rehabilitation? 

In cognitive rehabilitation therapy, you will work with a speech-language pathologist to 

• learn new thinking skills

•  improve your ability to pay attention and stay on task

• remember where you were in a project after you get distracted

• improve your memory for conversations and events

• track and plan larger projects and ideas

• improve your ability to solve problems and think of solutions to problems

• think fast enough to make decisions and judgements based on conversation, reading, and written information. 

Therapy works best when its collaborative. We will discuss what's important to you, and you will start working toward those goals from the very first session. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill or medication. Therapy is usually a combination of learning a skill, practicing a new technique, and then applying this technique to your life. In individualized therapy, you will also get to learn more about the brain, how it works, and how you can protect and care for your brain for the rest of your life.