Can Parkinson’s be cured by walking, or blindness by ‘higher judo’? These cures and their emphasis on the patient’s willpower and moral fibre are, at best, bizarre
A new spirit is taking hold of modern medicine, according to the Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge, and its name is neuroplasticity. For thousands of years, he says, medical orthodoxy has been wedded to “the doctrine of the unchanging brain”. Physicians have always assumed that our brains are built from a finite number of “cells”, each with its own job to do, and after it reaches maturity we lose them one by one until we end up in a second infancy. And that’s if we’re lucky: for many of us, the process will be speeded up by traumas or strokes or diseases that destroy whole regions of our brains, leaving us with no more chance of recovery than if we had lost an eye or an arm or a leg.
The science of neuroplasticity, Doidge assures us, has put paid to this hoary dogma, and we now know that the brain is capable of recovering from many of the injuries and insults that life throws at it. The first stirrings of the neuroplastic revolution go back to the 1920s, when the American scientist Karl Lashley showed that specific cerebral functions need not have any fixed “address” in the brain: they are distributed across shifting networks, and if one region stops working others may be able to take over. But the real breakthrough came in 1969, when another American scientist, Paul Bach-y-Rita, connected a video camera to 400 vibrating plates resting against a blind person’s back: after getting used to it the sightless subject experienced something analogous to vision, and managed to recognise objects placed in front of the camera, including an image of the supermodel Twiggy. But it was not till 2007, according to Doidge, that neuroplasticity “finally achieved wide recognition”.
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