Brain: Use It or Lose It

Brain is one of the complex things in the universe. There are lot of myths about the brain among people. We used to believe that brain would not change after certain age. We have been thought that people affected by stroke or paralysis could not recover. But, neurologists found that brain can change and reorganise itself. The ability of brain to change itself is named as neuroplasticity. The neurologists discovered that when a region of a brain was injured or affected, another region will take over the affected region. For instance, if the eyesight is affected, the brain region that manages eyesight will be utilised by the other senses like hearing which lead to increased ability of hearing than normal. 

Dr. Norman Doidge has published a marvelous book called ‘The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science’ which is full of mind-blowing case studies about neuroplasticity. He has written about how neuroplasticity helps neurologist to treat people with brain problems. It is amazing to know how people recover from brain problems using neuroplasticity ability of the brain.

(Brain - Picture Courtesy - Pixabay)

In an experiment, a neurologist, Michael Merzenich cut the median nerve in the hand of a monkey. The median nerve senses the middle of the hand, while the radial and ulnar nerves sense either side of the hand. After two months, he tested activities of those three nerve regions in the brain. When he touched the middle of the hand, as expected, he did not see any activity on the brain. But, when he stroked outsides of the hand, he saw an activity in the median nerve region of the brain. It shows that the radial and ulnar nerves started to use the median nerve region of the brain.

(Brain That Changes Itself - Book cover)

Dr. Doidge has written about a lady who is in her forties (the book was released in 2007) and has a genetic mutation which made her retinal cells to die. She became totally blind. Then, she started to listen to audio books using a computer program from Kurzweil Educational System. Her ability to listening audio books increased faster. She could listen 340 words per minute and also read three novels in a day. Dr. Doidge explains that when her visual cortex stopped to process sight, auditory processing over take the visual cortex and helps her to read faster than before. 

Dr. Doidge also has described about a case study of another lady whose sense of balance was not working because, excessive intake of gentamycin damaged her vestibular apparatus in the inner ear which usually maintains sense of balance and spatial orientation. She felt like she was in free fall and her head was wobbling. She also lost the sense of the floor and felt like people walking a tightrope. One of the pioneers in neuroplasticity studies, Paul Bach-y-Rita treated her with accelerometer, a plastic strip comprising electrodes and a computer. The accelerometer was fixed in a hat which the patient would wear. 

The accelerometer sends signals to the plastic strip. The patient would lick the plastic strip for certain time. Both the accelerometer and the plastic strip were connected to a computer. When she was wearing the hat, she did not feel falling and not wobbling. She wore the hat for one minute and removed it. The residual effect of the treatment was there for next 20 seconds. That means she felt normal after removing the hat. The practice increased the residual effect to 3 hours 20 minutes and latter to 4 months. Finally, she did not need to use the device and she became normal. Dr. Bach-y-Rita explains that the damaged vestibular system was sending off random noisy signal which blocked normal signals from the healthy tissue. The machine treatment helped to strengthen the normal signals from the healthy tissue. 

Paul Bach-y-Rita’s father, Pedro Bach-y-Rita was a Catalan poet and scholar. He had stroke at the age of 65. His face and half of his body were paralyzed. Paul’s brother George was a medical student at that time. George taught his father crawling as like teaching babies. Then he kept coins on the floor and encouraged his father to pick them up with the weak hand. George trained his father with similar activities for hours daily. Those trainings helped his father to walk again. Later, he was also able to speak and started his teaching career at City College in New York at the age of 68. When Pedro died at the age of 72, Dr. Bach-y-Rita and Dr. Mary Jane Aguilar were examined his brain. They found a big lesion in the brain stem. The cortex region which controls body movement was also got damaged. The important thing is, the lesion was never cured. Dr. Bach-y-Rita understood that his father’s brain was reorganized itself by the trainings given to Pedro by George. 

Another fascinating chapter in the book show how the imaginations can change brain anatomy. A Jewish computer specialist and a human rights activist, Anatoly Sharansky was falsely accused as a spy and was in the prison for nine years in the Soviet Union. He was placed in a solitary confinement for 400 days. Generally, solitary confinement degrades the mental health of the people. To fight the loneliness, Sharansky played chess mentally for months. Sharansky was released and became a cabinet minister in Israel. Once, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played chess against the prime minister and cabinet leaders of Israel and he won everyone except Sharansky. 

In this book, Dr. Doidge shows how plasticity-based computer programs and normal activities like picking up objects and other hand movement exercises help paralyzed people and people with cognitive problems to recover their normal activities. He also has described that such computer programs help elder people to increase their cognitive activities. He says mentally stimulating activities can reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease and playing musical instruments, board games, reading and dancing can reduce the risk of dementia. He mentions that brain fitness requires learning new skills.  There are more interesting case studies in this book. I highly recommend everyone to read this book.