The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano. One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuro-anatomist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the “organ of thought is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercise.” In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice,” must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.