Subject: plasticity of brain
"In 1959 [Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita]'s sixty-five-year-old father, Pedro, had a stroke that paralyzed his face and half his body and left him unable to speak. The doctors told Paul's brother George that Pedro had no hope of recovery. George, a medical student, was still too early in his medical studies to have learned the doctrine of the unchanging brain. So he began treating his father without preconceived ideas. After two years of daily, intensive, incremental brain and movement exercises, Pedro underwent a complete recovery. After he died (mountain climbing at the age of seventy-two!), Paul had an autopsy performed on Pedro and discovered that 97 percent of the nerves in a key pathway in his brain stem were destroyed. Paul had an epiphany: the exercises that Pedro had done had reorganized and rewired his brain and built new processing areas and connections that worked around the stroke damage. It meant that even the brain of an old man was plastic.
"Paul's research was in vision. One of his first applications of neuroplasticity was to develop a device to help the blind see. 'We see with our brain, not with our eyes,' he said, arguing that the eyes are merely a 'data port'; its receptor, the retina, converts information from the electromagnetic spectrum that surrounds us -- in this case, light -- into electrical discharge patterns, which are sent down the nerves. There are no images or pictures in the brain (just as there are no sounds, smells, or tastes), just patterns of electrical-chemical signals. Based on a comparative analysis of the retina and the skin, Paul determined that the skin, too, could detect images, as it does, for instance, when we teach a child the letter A by tracing it on his skin. The skin's touch receptors convert that information into electrical discharge patterns, which are then sent to the brain.
The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
Author: Norman Doidge
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