The whole premise Doidge puts on the table is nothing short of a revolution in the way we understand how our brains function: we are born with brains that can change the way they work. They can rewire themselves so that one area can take over when there is damage in another. If a portion of our brains are underdeveloped, by birth or by under use, we can rebuild it like a muscle. Furthermore, this changing brain can morph itself "from the cradle to the grave" so that a man in his eighties can regain the cognitive functions he once had in his fifties and a massive stroke victim might fully recover the abilities she was so swiftly robed of.
Paul Bach-y-Rita, a pioneering neuroplastician, had discovered that the brain is able to replace one sense with another. He explains that we sense the world around us with our brains and not with our senses. For example, light is detected in the back of the eye through photo sensitive tissue. Electrical signals only become vision when they are interpreted by the brain. Bach-y-Rita made the brilliant discovery that it did not matter where the stimulation was coming from, the brain could interpret stimulation from any part of the body as vision.
Bach-y-Rita used a machine to 'scan' a scene, pixilate this information and send it to four hundred 'vibrating stimulators, arranged in rows on a metal plate". This metal plate was inserted into the back of a chair. A person sitting in this seat would interpret vibrating stimulators as the white area of a scene and the still stimulators as the dark areas. This bizarre machine allowed people who were blind from birth to 'read, make out faces and shadows, and distinguish which objects were closer and which were farther away". It even allowed them to perceive perspective. Eventually, this machine was reduced to a small plastic strip with hundreds of tiny electrodes that would tingle when placed on the tongue. Amazingly, now the tongue had become the seeing organ.
Bach-y-Rita explains that this is possible because our senses are "plastic'. By plastic, he means that our brains are made to be rewired. Plasticity is the rule and not the exception. The 'vision' example demonstrates just how plastic our brains can be.
However, our senses are not the only plastic facet of our brains. Barbara Arrowsmith Young was born with an incredible visual and auditory memory. On the other hand, Barbra had plenty of physical and cognitive obstacles.
Her body was strangely "asymmetrical', her field of vision was so narrow that she could only see what was directly in front of her and she had difficulty pronouncing words.
Yet some of Barbara's greatest challenges were her difficulty with grammar, math concepts, logic and cause and effect. Her brain could not handle symbolic reasoning.
Traditional interventions used 'compensation' to deal with disabilities. If you were a slow learner, you would be given more time to complete tasks. If you had trouble hearing, you would be given an audio tape. Barbara however decided to exercise her weaknesses instead of work around them. Barbara understood that her brain had the capacity for change so she isolated herself and worked one cognitive weakness at a time. She found that if she focused, for example, on relating number symbols to each other, she became better than the average person. In addition, by improving one function of thinking, others showed improvement as well.
I have experienced similar success with my own son. He is autistic and has underdeveloped cognitive functions as well. The more I focus on his core deficits, the less pronounced his deficits become. Ellis is doing more than learning, he is also making physical changes to the structure of his brain. That is why he can sometimes take months to learn something it takes another child only moments to learn: that child already has the neural network established in his brain. Ellis on the other hand may be building it from the very bottom up. It helps to know that the brain acts like a muscle. It gives me patience to keep trying and it offers me hope that consistent efforts will pay off in the long run.
I have no doubt that this book can change the way people think about what is and is not possible in their lives. 'The Brain That Changes Itself' is for anybody who wants to marvel at the potential that is in all of us.
Jason Goldsmith is the founder of Big Blue Hug which raises awareness with its story telling art.
Visit http://www.thebigbluehug.com/ to learn more about Big Blue Hug art and about PictureTalking intervention and workshops.
Find the book HERE:
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/search?keywords=the+brain+that+changes+itself&pageSize=10
The author's website is HERE:
http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html
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