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Doidge: The Brain that Changes Itself
Chapter One: A Woman Perpetually Falling
Terms:
Neuroplasticity: The brain is not static and hardwired; rather, the neural pathways are changed due to experiences with the world. Neuroplasticity implies that domain specificity is either partially or completely wrong.
Plastic (in this sense): capable of being molded, having a yielding nature; flexible or pliable
Localizationism: each part of the brain has one particular function and each function can only be performed in one place. If the brain is damaged, then the functions that corresponded to that location are gone (speech, hearing, motor control…) and that loss is permanent.
Mechanist Materialism: the view (put forward by people like Galileo and Descartes) that all matter acts in accordance with natural laws. Even the human body is a law-like and machine-like set of mechanisms that is constructed to perform a series of discrete functions.
Context of the debate:
Promoters of domain specificity (like Duchaine, Cosmides & Tooby) argue that the brain is not plastic and that it has evolved to have a massive number of modules perform particular tasks and only their tasks. Since this sort of brain is believed to be the most efficient and practical, and since brain damage has reliably similar functional deficits for each location, the conclusion they come to is that the brain cannot change and has remained the same since our Paleolithic (stone age) ancestors.
Doidge, on the other hand, cites examples from neuroscience that show that even the seemingly most “hardwired” of all brain functions (the senses) can be re-mapped, then the domain-specificity/localizationism argument does not tell the whole story.
History:
Doidge briefly refers to the history of neuroscience and explains how it came to adopt the innate model versus the plastic one.
Referring to Galileo, Harvey and Descartes (16th and 17th century scientists and philosophers), Doidge show how mechanist views of the universe eventually included mechanist views of the human body (Galileo: all natural bodies are governed by natural laws; Harvey: the heart is a simple pump that performs the function of circulating blood; Descartes: the nervous system is a set of tubes that transmit information from the body to the brain and back again).
These mechanistic views of the body (well, Harvey’s and Descartes’) carried the logic of most mechanisms with them: machines are made of parts and systems of parts designed to perform specific functions (and not other functions. And, if a part is broken, it ceases to perform its corresponding function. This sort of thinking about the brain is the beginning of localizationism.
More troubling, though, is how the assumption that localizationism is true has caused scientists, doctors and scientific publications to ignore evidence presented about neuroplasticity. By assuming that the metatheory was true, many were unable to imagine that any experiments that proved the possibility of neuroplasticity could even be valid (ex: when Bach-y-Rita, in 1969, designed a device that manages to create visual information on congenitally blind people, he was not fully taken seriously and continued to be an obscure and unknown researcher despite the magnitude of his discovery).
To this day, Bach-y-Rita proudly claims, “I can connect anything to anything.” This suggests that no concept of innate brain function, however hardwired it seems to us, is truly hard wired for an open-minded supporter of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplastic Examples:
Cheryl the “Wobbler”: Doidge opens with the story of Cheryl, whose vestibular apparatus (the thing that we need to maintain balance) was completely destroyed. As a result, she always felt like she was falling, and found it impossible to keep herself upright. Doctors told her this would be permanent (and that view was certainly consistent with the idea that the brain is hard wired and all functions are domain specific and innate). Neurophysician, Bach-y-Rita, created a device that rerouted sense of touch information (from her tongue) so that it would replace the vestibular apparatus and give balance information to her brain. After much work, she was essentially cured of her condition. Doidge argues that this shows how plastic the brain really is, and that neuro-stimuli can be rerouted and different parts of the brain can take over the job when one part is damaged. This means that the brain cannot be completely ‘hardwired’ and that localization cannot be the entire story.
Bach-y-Rita’s father: When his father had a stroke that damaged his ability to speak and paralyzed him on one side, Bach-y-Rita’s brother took over his physiotherapy and tried to improve his father’s condition (though he was assured by the doctors that the effects of the stroke would be permanent). Over a period of about 2 years, his father began to crawl and then eventually walk, regained his speech, regain motor function on his paralyzed side, could type again (first only one finger but then completely normally over time) and even went back to teaching at University. After his death, and autopsy had shown that the damage to the brain was quite significant and that the parts of the brain that were damaged (mostly the motor control areas of the brain) were such that it was a miracle that he managed to recover to the extent that he did. Doidge uses this example to show how, once again, other parts of the brain took over those tasks and performed functions that were not supposed to be their functions. This illustrates that localizationism cannot be entirely right and that one must acknowledge the plastic nature of the brain.
The plastic brain is an adaptive brain:
Unlike Duchaine, Cosmides, and Tooby, Doidge does not think that the most adaptive brain would be hard-wired with discrete, domain-specific modules. In stead, he argues that the best sort of brain that would allow an organism to adapt to its environment is a plastic one. Thus, not only is the brain highly plastic, bt a plastic model is more adaptive than a massively modular one.
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