Attention may be the most important skill you have. It doesn’t just allow you to concentrate on a task; it allows you to switch your attention, prevents impulsive responding and has been highlighted as a significant predictor of educational and vocational outcomes.

Glenn Smith has dedicated his career to helping our youngest learners, children aged 3 to 8, improve their attention skills which helps them focus better, feel calmer and learn quicker.

With these goals in mind, Glenn, as CEO of Tali, has developed a digital, touchscreen-based tool to tackle these problems; Tali Train.

From just 25 minutes use, 5 days a week, learners will experience measurable and meaningful improvements to their attention skills. It’s also a fun, engaging and short-term program that’s well suited to an educational environment.

Childhood attention difficulties can have a lifelong impact. With every year that passes, children experience increasing education, social and health repercussions that can lead to problems in adulthood.

Tali Train’s attention training program consists of four adaptive exercises, each designed to train different aspects of attention: selection, focus, control and inhibition.

• Selection: The selection game encourages children to shut out distractions and decide what’s important.
• Control: The control game helps children develop the skills to choose what to attend to and what to ignore.
• Inhibition: The inhibition game teaches children the skills to avoid acting impulsively.
• Focus: The focus game helps children to focus on the task at hand for a longer period of time.

In the same way that physical training requires the body to repeat the same exercises time and time again to strengthen the muscles involved, cognitive training operates on the same principles, using the brain’s muscle memory.

Independent trials of Tali Train have occurred through Monash University. They conducted multiple scientific randomised control trials with children presenting with various conditions, all, where a lack of attention was a primary concern. You can find those publications here: https://talihealth.com/research/

To date, Tali Train has been used by approximately 1500 children. The majority of those children have received benefit, with the data from the program confirming the results from the published scientific trials.

Importantly, parents and the teachers delivering the program to the children have confirmed the benefit from the program.

With the documented benefits of Tali Train in hand, Glenn has turned his attention to partnering with schools and organisations, to get his product into the hands of as many children as possible.