Vanguard Neurologist

For more than 400 years mainstream science knew that human brain anatomy was fixed, that one brain part was assigned to a specific function. If a certain part of the brain was damaged by trauma or disease, that function was lost. New research gathered over the past 40 years debunks that.
What is neuroplasticity, you may ask? According to Normal Doidge, research psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontier of Brain Science (2007), “neuro” stands for neuron, the nerve cells in our brain and nervous system. “Plastic” means “changeable, malleable, modifiable”. The brain has an utterly amazing ability to move functions from one part of the brain to another, given the proper stimulus.
In each chapter Doidge explores a different type of brain challenge (see below); writes about at least one professional “plastician” working in the area; shares something of the professional’s personal experience that affected his/her perspective; includes at least one case study; incorporates a bit or a lot about the history of people who have worked in this area; and teaches much about how the brain functions. Doidge accomplishes all this in a very reader-friendly style!
Here’s a sampling of four of the eleven chapters.
“A Woman Perpetually Falling . . . . Rescued by the Man Who Discovered the Plasticity of Our Senses”. Cheryl felt like she was always falling because of a total loss of balance due to taking an antibiotic at the age of 39. She began wearing a special helmet designed by Paul Bach-y-Rita. Eventually other parts of her brain took over the balance functions.
“Midnight Resurrections – Stroke Victims Learn to Move and Speak Again”. Three stories of stroke recovery, often long after the actual stroke. Dr. Michael Bernstein, eye surgeon, had an incapacitating stroke at age 54. He completed Edward Taub’s constraint induced (CI) movement therapy, recovered and is back at work.
“Rejuvenation – The Discovery of the Neuronal Stem Cell and Lessons for Preserving Our Brains”. Doidge interviewed 90-year old Dr. Stanley Karansky who had just completed a series of brain exercises designed by Michael Merzenich with Posit Science. Karansky “was doing everything right to fight off age-related memory loss”.
“More than the Sum of Her Parts – A Woman Shows Us How Radically Plastic the Brain Can Be”. Michelle was born with only one side of her brain, because the left side was missing. Michelle worked with Jordan Grafman, chief of the Cognitive Neurosciences Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke when he explored how her brain now works. Grafman described four kinds of plasticity: map of expansion; sensory reassignment, compensatory masquerade, and mirror region takeover.
Topics covered in other chapters include attention and focus problems; sexual attraction and love; worries, obsessions, compulsions, and bad habits; phantom pain related to human limbs lost due to accident and amputation; psychoanalysis as neuroplastic therapy; and imagining an action can improve the doing of it almost as much as actually practicing it can.
This book documents a significant paradigm shift in our understanding of the abilities of the human brain. To conclude with a quote from Doidge: “One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior – surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century” (p. xix).