Neuroplasticity: Takin' it to the streets

Neuroplasticity has hit the pop health circuit, it seems, via Dr. Mercola:

According to the work of neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, it takes just 30 hours of neuroscience-based listening training to prompt amazing changes in your brain. Children with learning impairments were able to improve:

• Memory and cognition
• Speech production
• Reading

In other words, they were able to “fix” their brains with the training so they were able to function better with language, memory, speech and other basic skills. Further, the training worked on adults in their 80s and 90s too. Again after just 30 hours of training, elderly people improved:

• Immediate memory
• Delayed memory
• Attention
• Language
• Visio-spatial skills

The “brain training” Merzenich referred to was so effective because your brain is actually very much like a muscle. That is, your brain's structure changes over time and it may be possible to "bulk up" your brain throughout much of adulthood, given the proper training.

All I know is this: It's worth a try. Seniors who keep their minds active with constructive activities have a much happier old age than those who sit on a chair grousing about their illnesses or persecuting the daughter-in-law who selflessly looks after them.

And I've seen enough of both of the latter types of behaviour to last me the rest of my life.

Neuroplasticity: Exploring how brains wire and rewire

Michael Merzenich: Exploring the re-wiring of the brain (video lecture):

Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich looks at one of the secrets of the brain's incredible power: its ability to actively re-wire itself. He's researching ways to harness the brain's plasticity to enhance our skills and recover lost function.

A most interesting lecture on neuroplasticity, beginning with newborn children, and moving onward.

Memories: When I was four years old, I once asked my mother, "Why do some people call me Neet! Neet!"?

That was, apparently, my first effort to say my name, years earlier, and it had sort of stuck.

As in: Hi! I'm Neet! Neet! Want pop?

Yes, it sounds a bit like the computer's "Merry Chrysanthemum" Christmas card. Except it wasn't.

It wasn't a random walk through possible combinations. It was an effort on the part of a mind to recall and duplicate specific sounds, however inaccurately, so as to communicate with the world.

Dr. Merzenich traces the way in which infants learn to comprehend the world.

Neuroplasticity: Once "fringe" and now "cutting edge" - but career almost ruined

In Britain's Guardian, Ian Sample reviews Norman Doidge's new book, The Brain That Changes Itself, commenting ("Our flexible friend", Tuesday April 07 2009):

What was regarded as fringe science 40 years ago is currently at the cutting edge of neuroscience. With the right training, scientists now know the brain can reshape itself to work around dead and damaged areas, often with dramatic benefits. Therapies that exploit the brain's power to adapt have helped people overcome damage caused by strokes, depression, anxiety and learning disabilities, and may one day replace drugs for some of these conditions. Some studies suggest therapies that tap into the brain's neuroplasticity are already making a big difference. Children with language difficulties have been shown to make significant progress using computer training tools that are the equivalent of cerebral cross-training. Work is underway to investigate whether it is possible to stave off a loss of brain plasticity in older age, which might help to address memory problems linked to Alzheimer's disease. Some psychoanalysts are adopting techniques to help people overcome relationship troubles, obsessions, worries and bad habits.

The idea of brain plasticity has been discovered and forgotten many times over the centuries. The ancient Greeks accepted the idea, with Socrates believing that people could train their brains the way gymnasts train their bodies. Around the time of Galileo, the idea fell out of favour, as scientists began to see the world mechanistically, with each object, organ and even parts of an organ being attributed well-defined, unchanging roles. It was these ideas that led to the notion of our brains being "hardwired", an idea that today is steadily being overturned.

It's good to see this message getting out - but the discoveries were not without cost.

Doidge tells the story of a scientist whose career was nearly wrecked by the all-too-typical hostile science establishment, as he was trying to determine the facts: "A Christmas tale: Neuroscientist discovers hope for stroke victims - and science establishment's hostility".

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

A Christmas tale: Neuroscientist discovers hope for stroke victims - and science establishment's hostility

I've been reading Norman Doidge's, author of The Brain that Changes Itself, and in Chapter 5, Midnight Resurrections, he tells the compelling story of Edward Taub, who bucked the establishment and won.

In the mid-twentieth century, a central dogma of neuroscience was that the brain does not change. This had a major impact in decision-making about treatment for strokes and other disorders that create brain damage. Treatment was deemed useless, and patients were typically warehoused in chronic care centres.

I remember this well because in1966 I was a teenage volunteer in one such centre in Toronto - rows and rows of closely packed beds. Curiously, one patient (among many hundreds) had simply got better on her own and went home. It was considered a near miracle that gave much hope to the hard-pressed staff. I wonder, looking back, whether she had figured out something on her own - but not being an educated or prominent woman, she then took her secret with her to her grave. Here's why I wonder about that:

Early in his career, Taub started investigating neuroplasticity - a radical new idea that you change your brain according to what you think about. Some describe neuroplasticity as "use it or lose it" and others as "what you think about, so you become." Obviously, when we are discussing thinking, these two ideas are different ways of saying more or less the same thing. Of course, what makes the idea of neuroplasticity controversial is that it implies a subject who makes choices about what to think about - a non-materialist idea. But that is not the focus of this story.

Taub had, according to Doidge, started out in graduate school studying with behaviourists, who were interested neither in the mind nor in the brain, but only in measuring behaviour, according to stimulus and response: You = Pavlov's dog in trousers.

Well, Taub realized that that idea wasn't really going anywhere, so he made a risky choice - he took a job in an experimental neurology lab, to better understand the nervous system. This job included "deafferentation" experiments, using monkeys as subjects.

The basic idea is to sever the sensory nerves' connection with the brain, so the monkey no longer feels the limb. Typically, the monkey stops moving the limb too, which doesn't completely make sense, as the motor nerves are not severed. Taub discovered, as a graduate student, that if he put a monkey's good arm in a sling, the monkey would start using the deafferented arm again. Essentially, the monkey had stopped using the deafferented arm as a form of learned behaviour. It preferred the arm that continued to sense things (of course).

As Doidge puts it, Taub realized a couple of facts. One was that "behaviorism and neuroscience
had been going down a blind alley for seventy years." (P. 140) There wasn't anything "hardwired" about the monkeys' behaviour. They had simply made a choice; one that was reversible, given an incentive. Second, this finding could have dramatic implications for the treatment of brain damage in strokes. How much post-stroke paralysis is learned paralysis? Learned, in the sense that - having failed to use faculties for many months - the patient no longer has the nervous system connections to make movement possible or efficient. That was worth investigating.

Or so Taub thought. But he was mostly alone in that. Neuroscientists did not want to rethink their position on a fundamental issue, irrespective of what his findings clearly pointed to. "Most scientists in his field refused to believe his findings. He was attacked at scientific meetings and received no scientific recognition or awards." (P. 140) He was accused of "insolence" and had to get his PhD at New York State University rather than his original choice, Columbia.

There, Taub discovered by experiment that if the monkey was surgically deprived of feeling in both arms, it would use both arms. He had also learned, working with the monkeys, the importance of small rewards for just trying rather than a large reward for achievement. That insight could be put to use in developing exercises for humans as well.

So, in May 1981, he found himself head of a Behavioral Biology Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, when Alex Pacheco, cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), took a job in his lab, professing an interest in medical research ...

From Doidge:

PETA was and is against all medical research involving animals, even research to cure cancers, heart disease, and AIDS ... When Pacheco volunteered to work with Taub, his goal was to free the seventeen "Silver Spring monkeys" and make them a rallying cry for an animal rights campaign. (p. 143).

Pacheco got the police to seize the monkeys and got Taub arraigned for cruelty to animals. The science establishment, incredible as it may seem, chose to turn on Taub (fearing that they might be Pacheco's next victims, according to Doidge). Taub was arrested on 119 counts of cruelty to animals, losing his salary, his grants, and his lab privileges. (P. 145)

So a scientist who knew vital information about how to bring about recovery from a stroke became one of the most hated men in the United States, thanks in large part to a science establishment that chose to cater to an anti-human cause. Because that was the easy and safe thing to do. After all, it sounded good to Congressmen, pestered by animal activist constituents.

Taub spent the next six years of his life working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to clear himself, often functioning as his own lawyer. Before his trials began, he had $100,000 in life savings. By the end he had $4,000. Because he was blackballed, he couldn't get a job at a university. But gradually, trial by trial, appeal by appeal, charge, by charge, he refuted PETA. (p. 145)

Eventually, little thanks to the science establishment, Taub was able to open a clinic at the University of Alabama in 1986, and demonstrate that intensive rehabilitation (not half-hearted stuff mandated by a mediocre health insurance program) does reverse the supposedly permanent effects of many strokes. Early progress is slow because the affected arm has only half the original neurons to work with; effort restores the motor area of the brain to its normal size. Taub, having freed himself by his own efforts from the cowardice of the science establishment and the narrow fanaticism of anti-human cults, is currently studying optimum time periods for therapy.

So Christmas greetings from Toronto, and remember - if you have a good, original idea that does not feather the nest of the current establishment - en garde!

Note: One thing about PETA, they are the all time champs of getting everything wrong. Veterinary treatments normally follow medical treatments, so animals overseen by humans do benefit in the end. (Indeed, this state of affairs approached comic proportions recently when an Ontario hospital was caught renting out its fMRI scanner to veterinary clinics in the evening - in effect, your dog could get diagnosed sooner than you.)

Neuroplasticity: Growing public recognition greets Norman Doidge's new book

Friend Deborah Gyapong is looking forward to reading Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself:

Norman Doidge used to have a must-read column in the National Post, back in the days of Conrad Black's ownership. A man with a breadth of classical and medical education and a terrific writer to boot, he should be a treasured public intellectual. Today I was treated by a long op-ed by him in my Post. Sounds like his book The Brain That Changes Itself is something I must buy. And it sounds like a great companion to Denyse O'Leary and Dr. Mario Beauregard's The Spiritual Brain. I hope people pay attention to his findings, because they blast the mechanistic and materialist models that so many people think is scientific, when it fact cutting edge science has moved well beyond them.

Yes, it has, though some people haven't gotten the message yet. Here's a recent National Post piece (November 26, 2008), in which he discusses the fact that the brain is no longer seen as a machine:

... [formerly] the brain came to be seen as a complex machine with parts, each performing a single mental function, an idea with us today when we describe the brain as a kind of computer. This doctrine of the unchanging brain meant that many born with mental limitations, learning disabilities or certain psychiatric problems, or those who suffered brain damage or strokes, were seen, almost by definition, as condemned to live with them. Machines do many glorious things, but they don’t grow new parts, or reorganize themselves. This doctrine promoted a neurological nihilism that spread through our culture: At times it meant that human nature, which emerges from the brain, was seen as being equally rigid.

There were problems with hard-core localizationism from the beginning. As early as 1868 Jules Cotard had shown that children with a diseased left frontal lobe could speak quite well without it. This meant that Broca had only shown there was a tendency for speech to localize left, but it didn’t necessarily have to. Challenges to localization have been accelerating since. The winner of the Nobel Prize for 2000, psychiatrist Eric Kandel, showed that learning actually turns on our genes to make new proteins and create new connections in the brain’s circuits. The neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has shown that with repetition these circuits can become better at what they do and fire faster, more efficient signals. These findings have already been used to cure learning disorders and remedy a variety of psychiatric and neurological problems, treat strokes, raise IQs and preserve the ageing brain. We are not, it turns out, merely the galley slaves of our selfish-gene masters because conscious thought gives us a significant degree of control over their expression in our brains (and elsewhere), by moulding our microanatomy.

As Doidge points out, this change may help us get beyond false dilemmas. Consider, for example, the notion of that there is a "violence gene" or that "being a criminal is hardwired into So-and-So's brain." Obviously, for a variety of reasons, some are more prone to violence than others, but the "fatal gene" and the "hard wiring" are constructs of our imaginations that should not be cited in public policy proposals.

Herer's David Suzuki's CBC documentary on Doidge's book. An excerpt from the Introduction:

Known in scientific circles as "neuroplasticity," this radical new approach to the brain provides an incredible way to bring the human brain back to life. Some of the cases that we meet are:

Roger Behm, a blind man who is now able to see via his tongue (and can throw a basketball into a garbage can to prove it).

Cheryl Schiltz, who was written-off by doctors when she lost her sense of balance due to a drug's side effect. Once sentenced to a lifetime of wobbling, her brain rewired itself through a seemingly simple therapy, and has now regained her balance and returned to a normal life.

Michelle Mack, one of the greatest examples of the brain's ability to adapt: she was born, literally, with just half of her brain.

Michael Bernstein, who suffered a debilitating stroke in the prime of his life, paralyzing the left side of his body. He's now back to his former life, as his brain functions have been rerouted and re-invigorated.

The implications of this research, presented by Dr. Doidge through these compelling stories, are enormous. The impact is just beginning to be felt in research, medical and rehabilitation circles.

It is heartening and quite significant that neuroplasticity is gaining such broad recognition, along with the placebo effect and the effect of spirituality on health.

Here's a thought: One of the greatest medical triumphs of the mechanistic twentieth century was the eradication of smallpox in the wild. To that feat an understanding of patient mental states was irrelevant. However, advances of the twenty-first century cannot avoid considering issues like neuroplasticity and mental states.

Human longevity, after all, is altering health care. Simple "pill for every ill" solutions may have worked for the young Baby Boom - who were not usually very sick anyway - but will not help older midlife adults who must learn to manage chronic illnesses.

Free will: It used to be all my mom's fault, but now it's all my brain's fault?

Stephanie West Allen from Brains on Purpose points me to a "Battle of Ideas" seminar on FORA TV: My Brain Made Me Do It.

Quite honestly, I think that - apart from the high tech brain scanning - "my brain made me do it" is just this decade's version of the 1950s' psychiatrist's "it's all his mother's fault."

Neuroplasticity is a fact. We shape our brains through life by what we think about and how we think about it. I am not saying that everyone is in total control all the time, but that we must accept responsibility for a messy mind as we would for a messy house. And that includes the knowledge that we made it that way and that we can do something about it if we want to. And if we don't want to, we have made a choice.

Here's a different view from cognitive scientist and artist Jim Davies:

Descartes's dichotomy of the non-material mind and the material brain still lingers on in our cultural understanding of psychology. One place I think it arises is in the "problem" of free will. Your brain determining how you react to an environment is not a troublesome notion if you think that the brain running your mind is all you are. People say "but my brain controls me!" As though the "me" were some spirit. Your "me" is just the software running on the brain. Your brain and mind determining what you do is your exercising of free will, at least in any meaningful sense of the term.

So, it is not so much that your brain made you do it as that there is no "you" to begin with. It's just software and hardware.

Davies thinks that anyone who would disagree with his materialist view must be a non-scientist, which would come as news to Mario Beauregard and Jeff Schwartz.

I think his view demonstrates the chief reason that the computer analogy for the human brain does not work. Software is a product of a human mind. It is not itself a mind. Minds produce software, but not the reverse.