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

by Norman Doidge

The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. 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 brain-power 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 omniprese...

Obsessive-compulsives, so often filled with doubt, may become terrified of making a mistake and start compulsively correcting themselves and others. One woman took hundreds of hours to write brief letters because she felt so unable to find words that didn’t feel “mistaken.” Many a Ph.D. dissertation stalls—not because the author is a perfectionist, but because the doubting writer with OCD can’t find words that don’t “feel” totally wrong. When

Brain scans of OCD patients show that all three brain areas are hyperactive. The orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate turn on and stay on as though locked in the “on position” together—one reason that Schwartz calls OCD “brain lock.” Because the caudate doesn’t “shift the gear” automatically, the orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate continue to fire off their signals, increasing the mistake feeling and the anxiety. Because the person has already corrected the mistake, these are, of course, false alarms. The malfunctioning caudate is probably overactive because it is stuck and is still being inundated with signals from the orbital frontal cortex. The causes of severe

Nicolelis and Chapin hoped their work would help patients with various kinds of paralysis. That happened in July 2006, when a team led by neuroscientist John Donoghue, from Brown University, used a similar technique with a human being. The twenty-five-year-old man, Matthew Nagle, had been stabbed in the neck and paralyzed in all four limbs by the resulting spinal cord injury. A tiny, painless silicone chip with a hundred electrodes was implanted in his brain and attached to a computer. After four days of practice he was able to move a computer cursor on a screen, open e-mail, adjust the channel and volume control on a television, play a computer game, and control a robotic arm using his thoughts. Patients with muscular dystrophy, strokes, and motor-neuron disease are scheduled to try the thought-translation device next. The goal in these approaches is ultimately to implant a small microelectrode array, with batteries and a transmitter the size of a baby’s fingernail, in the motor cortex. A small computer could be connected either to a robotic arm or wire-lessly to a wheelchair control or to electrodes implanted in muscles to trigger movements. Some scientists hope to develop a technology less invasive than microelectrodes to detect neuronal firing—possibly a variant of TMS, or a device Taub and colleagues are developing to detect changes in brain waves.

An operator is selected by competition. The operator theory appears to draw on the theory of neuronal group selection developed in 1987 by Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, who proposed that for any brain activity, the ablest group of neurons is selected to do the task. There is an almost Darwinian competition—a neural Darwinism, to use Gerald Edelman’s phrase—going on all the time between operators to see which ones can most effectively process signals from a particular sense and in a particular circumstance.

Someone presented with an overwhelming auditory task, such

as memorizing Homer’s Iliad, might blindfold himself to recruit operators usually devoted to sight, since the vast operators in the visual cortex can process sound. In Homer’s time, long poems were composed and passed from generation to generation in oral form. (Homer, according to tradition, was himself blind.) Memorization was essential in preliterate cultures; indeed, illiteracy may have prompted people’s brains to assign more operators to auditory tasks. Yet such feats of oral memory are possible in literate cultures if there is sufficient motivation. For centuries Yemenite Jews taught their children to memorize the entire Torah, and today children in Iran memorize the entire Koran.