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

by Norman Doidge

We know from brain scans of people who use massive amounts of mental practice what was probably happening in Sharansky’s brain while he was in prison. Consider the case of Rüdiger Gamm, a young German man of normal intelligence who turned himself into a mathematical phenomenon, a human calculator. Though Gamm was not born with exceptional mathematical ability, he can now calculate the ninth power or the fifth root of numbers and solve such problems as “What is 68 times 76?” in five seconds. Beginning at age twenty, Gamm, who worked in a bank, began doing four hours of computational practice a day. By the time he was twenty-six, he had become a calculating genius, able to make his living by performing on television. Investigators who examined him with a positron emission tomography (PET) brain scan while he was calculating found he was able to recruit five more brain areas for calculating than “normal” people. The psychologist Anders Ericsson, an expert in the development of expertise, has shown that people like Gamm rely on long-term memory to help them solve mathematical problems when others rely on short-term memory. Experts don’t store the answers, but they do store key facts and strategies that help them get answers, and they have immediate access to them, as though they were in short-term memory. This use of long-term memory for problem solving is typical of experts in most fields, and Ericsson found that becoming an expert in most fields usually takes about a decade ...