The Brain That Changes Itself
An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age. Psychiatrist and researcher, Norman Doidge, travelled to meet the scientists working with neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they have transformed - people whose mental limitations or brain damage were previously seen as unalterable, and whose conditions had long been dismissed as hopeless. A woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole; a woman labelled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises and now cures those of others; blind people who learn to see; learning disorders cured; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; entrenched depression and anxiety disappearing and lifelong character traits changed.
Doidge takes us onto terrain that might seem fantastic. We learn that our thoughts can switch our genes on and off, altering our brain anatomy. People of average intelligence can, with brain exercises, improve their cognition and perception, develop muscle strength or learn to play a musical instrument - simply by imagining doing so.
Using personal stories and a highly readable style, Dr Doidge has written and immensely moving and inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains and human potential.
An excerpt from The Brain That Changes Itself:
'The origin of (Paul) Bach-y-Rita's understanding of brain rehabilitation lies in the dramatic recovery of his own father, the Catalan poet and scholar Pedro Bach-y-Rita, after a disabling stroke. In 1959 Pedro, then a sixty-five-year-old widower, had a stroke that paralysed his face and half of his body and left him unable to speak....George, Paul's brother, then a medical student...brought his paralysed father to live with him.
George knew nothing about rehabilitation, and his ignorance turned out to be a godsend, because he succeeded by breaking all its current rules, unencumbered by pessimistic theories.
"I decided that instead of teaching my father to walk, I was going to teach him first to crawl again for a while....At first we held him on all fours, but his arms and legs didn't hold him very well, so it was a struggle." As soon as Pedro could support himself somewhat, George then got him to crawl with his weak shoulder and arm supported by a wall. "That crawling beside the wall went on for months. After that I even had him practising in the garden, which led to problems with the neighbours, who were saying it wasn't nice, it was unseemly, to be making the professor crawl like a dog. The only model I had was how babies learn. So we played games on the floor, with me rolling marbles, and him having to catch them.... Everything we tried involved turning normal life experiences into exercises. We turned washing pots into an exercise. He'd hold the pot with his good hand and make his weak hand - it had little control and made spastic jerking movements - go round and round, fifteen minutes clockwise, fifteen minutes counter-clockwise....Little by little, he got better.".......
At the end of a year his recovery was complete enough for Pedro, now sixty-eight, to start full-time teaching again at City College in New York. He loved it and worked until he retired at seventy. Then he got another teaching job at San Francisco State, remarried, and kept working, hiking and travelling. He was active for seven more years after his stroke. On a visit to friends in ... Colombia, he went climbing high in the mountains. At nine thousand feet he had a heart attack and died.... It was 1965, and in those days, before brain scans, autopsies were routine because they were one way doctors could learn about brain diseases, and about why a patient died. Paul asked Mary Jane Aguilar to perform the autopsy.....
"When I got to the old Stanford Hospital, there, spread out on the table were slices of my father's brain on slides.....I was feeling revulsion, but I could also see Mary Jane's excitement, because what the slides showed was that my father had had a huge lesion from his stroke and that it had never healed, even though he recovered all those functions...." When he looked closely he saw that his father's seven year old lesion was mainly in the brain stem.....and that other major brain centres in the cortex that control movement had been destroyed by the stroke as well. Ninety-seven percent of the nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed - catastrophic damage that had caused his paralysis.
"I knew that meant that somehow his brain had totally reorganized itself with the work he did with George. We didn't know how remarkable his recovery was until that moment, because we had no idea of the extent of his lesion." '
Paul Bach-y-Rita is one of the great pioneers in understanding brain plasticity.
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