Excerpt from "Rewiring the Brain—A change of mind is now everyone’s prerogative" by Matthew Blakeslee:
If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic. This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play at Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline.
It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent.
Read the rest of "Rewiring the Brain—A change of mind is now everyone’s prerogative."
yo, Stephanie, GREAT POST and link. This discussion about plasticity is cutting edge.
Posted by: crimlawdoc | March 13, 2007 at 09:04 PM
Great post and comments! This is cutting-edge stuff and VERY powerful.
Posted by: crimlawdoc | March 13, 2007 at 09:06 PM