The Brain That Changes Itself (2007)
By Norman Doidge
Redesigning the Brain (Chapter 3)
A Scientist Changes Brains to Sharpen Perception and Memory, Increase Speed of Thought, and Heal Learning Problems
Michael Merzenich is a driving force behind scores of neuroplastic innovations and practical inventions, and I am on the road to Santa Rosa, California, to find him. His is the name most frequently praised by other neuroplasticians, and he’s by far the hardest to track down. Only when I found out that he would be at a conference in Texas, went there, and sat myself down beside him, was I finally able to set up a meeting in San Francisco.
“Use this e mail address,” he says.
“And if you don’t respond again?”
“Be persistent.”
At the last minute, he switches our meeting to his villa in Santa Rosa.
Merzenich is worth the search.
The Irish neuroscientist Ian Robertson has described him as “the world’s leading researcher on brain plasticity.” Merzenich’s specialty is improving people’s ability to think and perceive by redesigning the brain by training specific processing areas, called brain maps, so that they do more mental work. He has also, perhaps more than any other scientist, shown in rich scientific detail how our brain-processing areas change.
This villa in the Santa Rosa hills is where Merzenich slows down and regenerates himself. This air, these trees, these vineyards, seem like a piece of Tuscany transplanted into North America. I spend the night here with him and his family, and then in the morning we are off to his lab in San Francisco.
Those who work with him call him “Merz,” to rhyme with “whirs” and “stirs.” As he drives his small convertible to meetings—he’s been double-booked much of the afternoon—his gray hair flies in the wind, and he tells me that many of his most vivid memories, in this, the second half of his life—he’s sixty-one—are of conversations about scientific ideas. I hear him pour them into his cell phone, in his crackling voice. As we pass over one of San Francisco’s glorious bridges, he pays a toll he doesn’t have to because he’s so involved with the concepts we are discussing. He has dozens of collaborations and experiments all going on at once and has started several companies. He describes himself as “just this side of crazy.” He is not, but he is an interesting mix of intensity and informality. He was born in Lebanon, Oregon, of German stock, and though his name is Teutonic and his work ethic unrelenting, his speech is West Coast, easygoing, down-to-earth.
Of neuroplasticians with solid hard-science credentials, it is Merzenich who has made the most ambitious claims for the field: that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia; that plasticity exists from the cradle to the grave; and that radical improvements in cognitive functioning—how we learn, think, perceive, and remember—are possible even in the elderly. His latest patents are for techniques that show promise in allowing adults to learn language skills, without effortful memorization. Merzenich argues that practicing a new skill, under the right conditions, can change hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the connections between the nerve cells in our brain maps.
If you are skeptical of such spectacular claims, keep in mind that they come from a man who has already helped cure some disorders that were once thought intractable. Early in his career Merzenich developed, along with his group, the most commonly used design for the cochlear implant, which allows congenitally deaf children to hear. His current plasticity work helps learning-disabled students improve their cognition and perception. These techniques—his series of plasticity-based computer programs, Fast ForWord—have already helped hundreds of thousands. Fast ForWord is disguised as a children’s game. What is amazing about it is how quickly the change occurs. In some cases people who have had a lifetime of cognitive difficulties get better after only thirty to sixty hours of treatment. Unexpectedly, the program has also helped a number of autistic children.
Merzenich claims that when learning occurs in a way consistent with the laws that govern brain plasticity, the mental “machinery” of the brain can be improved so that we learn and perceive with greater precision, speed, and retention.
Clearly when we learn, we increase what we know. But Merzenich’s claim is that we can also change the very structure of the brain itself and increase its capacity to learn. Unlike a computer, the brain is constantly adapting itself.
“The cerebral cortex,” he says of the thin outer layer of the brain, “is actually selectively refining its processing capacities to fit each task at hand.” It doesn’t simply learn; it is always “learning how to learn.” The brain Merzenich describes is not an inanimate vessel that we fill; rather it is more like a living creature with an appetite, one that can grow and change itself with proper nourishment and exercise. Before Merzenich’s work, the brain was seen as a complex machine, having unalterable limits on memory, processing speed, and intelligence. Merzenich has shown that each of these assumptions is wrong.
Merzenich did not set out to understand how the brain changes. He only stumbled on the realization that the brain could reorganize its maps. And though he was not the first scientist to demonstrate neuroplasticity, it was through experiments he conducted early in his career that mainstream neuroscientists came to accept the plasticity of the brain.
To understand how brain maps can be changed, we need first to have a picture of them. They were first made vivid in human beings by the neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute in the 1930s. For Penfield, “mapping” a patient’s brain meant finding where in the brain different parts of the body were represented and their activities processed—a solid localizationist project. Localizationists had discovered that the frontal lobes were the seat of the brain’s motor system, which initiates and coordinates the movement of our muscles. The three lobes behind the frontal lobe, the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes, comprise the brain’s sensory system, processing the signals sent to the brain from our sense receptors—eyes, ears, touch receptors, and so on.
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