The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant." But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols, For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation — the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.Barbara Arrowsmith Young's work compels us to imagine how much good might be accomplished if every child had a brain-based assessment and, if problems were found, a tailor-made program created to strengthen essential areas in the early years, when neuroplasticity is greatest. It is far better to nip brain problems in the bud than to allow the child to wire into his brain the idea that he is "stupid," begin to hate school and learning, and stop work in the weakened area, losing whatever strength he may have. Younger children often progress more quickly through brain exercises than do adolescents, perhaps because in an immature brain the number of connections among neurons, or synapses, is 50 percent greater than in the adult brain.
Early in his career Merzenich developed, along with his group, the most commonly used design for the cochlear implant, which allows congenitally deaf children to hear. His current plasticity work helps learning-disabled students improve their cognition and perception. These techniques — his series of plasticity-based computer programs, Fast ForWord — have already helped hundreds of thousands. Fast ForWord is disguised as a children's game. What is amazing about it is how quickly the change occurs. In some cases people who have had a lifetime of cognitive difficulties get better after only thirty to sixty hours of treatment. Unexpectedly, the program has also helped a number of autistic children.
They (Merzenich et al.) took a small patch of skin from one finger, and — this is the key point — with the nerve to its brain map still attached, surgically grafted the skin onto an adjacent finger. Now that piece of skin and its nerve were stimulated whenever the finger it was attached to was moved or touched in the course of daily use. According to the anatomical- hardwiring model, the signals should still have been sent from the skin along its nerveto the brain map for the finger that the skin and nerve originally came from. Instead, when the team stimulated the patch of skin, the map of its new finger responded. e patch of skin migrated from the brain map of the original finger to its new one, because both the patch and the new finger were stimulated simultaneously.
One disturbing study showed that the closer children lived to the noisy airport in Frankfurt, Germany, the lower their intelligence was. A similar study, on children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, found that the closer their floor was to the highway, the lower their intelligence.
The first step is for a person having an OCD attack to relabel what is happening to him, so that he realizes that what he is experiencing is not an attack of germs, AIDS, or battery acid but an episode of OCD. He should remember that brain lock occurs in the three parts of the brain. As a therapist, I encourage OCD patients to make the following summary for themselves: "Yes, I do have a real problem right now. But it is not germs, it is my OCD." This relabeling allows them to get some distance from the content of the obsession and view it in somewhat the same way Buddhists view suffering in meditation: they observe its effects on them and so slightly separate themselves from it....
Schwartz has found it essential to understand that it is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do. "The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling" — by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession.
A computer program from Kurzweil Educational Systems reads books aloud to her in a monotone that pauses for commas, stops for periods, and rises in pitch for questions. This computer voice is so rapid, I cannot make out a single word. But Emma has gradually learned to listen at a faster and faster pace, so she is now reading at about 340 words a minute and is marching through all the great classics.i
Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body. When you throw your back out, you say, "My back is killing me!" and not, "My pain system is killing me." But as phantoms show, we don't need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain. We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps. People with actual limbs don't usually realize this, because the body images of our limbs are perfectly projected onto our actual limbs, making it impossible to distinguish our body image from our body. "Your own body is a phantom," says Ramachandran, "one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience."...
Then Ramachandran performed an even simpler trick. He told me to put my right hand under the table, so my hand was hidden. Then he tapped the tabletop with one hand, while with his other he tapped mine under the table, where I couldn't see it, in an identical rhythm. When he moved the spot where he hit the tabletop, a bit to the left or right, he moved his hand under the table exactly the same way. After a few minutes I stopped experiencing him as tapping my hand under the table and instead — fantastic as it sounds — started to feel that the body image of my hand had merged with the tabletop, so that the sensation of being tapped seemed to come from the table-top. He had created an illusion in which my sensory body image had now been expanded to include a piece of furniture!
We now know that exercise and mental activity in animals generate and sustain more brain cells, and we have many studies confirming that humans who lead mentally active lives have better brain function. The more education we have, the more socially and physically active we are, and the more we participate in mentally stimulating activities, the less likely we are to get Alzheimer's disease or dementia....
Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration — studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing — are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer's.