The Plastic Brain

On a fine day in September 1995, Howard Rocket, a hard-driving 48-year-old entrepreneur, leaped for a pass in a friendly touch-football game in downtown Toronto. He slipped and fell, hitting the back of his head, and a minute later came to with a wicked, ever worsening headache. Then, dark spots floated into his field of vision.

He ignored these things until three weeks later, when he was home alone and suddenly lost control of his arms and legs. A sharp, deep pain pierced his head and darkness closed in. He groped his way to the phone, slowly tapped 9-1-1, then collapsed.

Rocket’s brain had been attacked by a basilar thrombotic stroke, in which a clot blocks blood flow to the brain stem. This kills most people, but Rocket was saved by doctors who injected him with a clot-busting drug.

In the days that followed, though, their prognosis was grim: Rocket would never regain the use of his left arm, leg or foot. His muscles were fine, but the parts of his brain that directed them were seriously damaged. In other words, he’d better get used to a wheelchair.

Defying the odds

Determined to prove the doctors wrong, Rocket began rigorous physiotherapy. If he made his left foot move over and over again, he figured, eventually the undamaged cells of his brain would find a way to tell the foot what to do.

After he learned to stand, he strapped his left foot to the pedal of a stationary bike at the gym, then started pedalling. On the first day, he lasted only 30 seconds—but he persisted. It was like doing sit-ups for the brain.

Twelve years later, after thousands of hours in the gym, Rocket danced on both feet. His doctors were amazed.

“It was dramatic,” says Dr. Robert Willinsky, the neuroradiologist who saved Rocket’s life with the clot-buster. “He’s a poster child, for sure.”

Brain can be retrained

It turned out Rocket’s hunch was right: It is possible to retrain your brain to make up for the part that’s out of order. A generation ago, that idea was dismissed as folly by most medical practitioners.

They thought the adult brain was like a machine: It couldn’t change or grow; all it could do was break down. But over the past few decades, brain scans such as the PET and functional MRI (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe this organ in action. Now they can see that the conventional thinking about the brain was wrong.

Neuroplasticity is real

If one part of the brain is injured, especially the cerebral cortex (the outer layer, which processes the signals for perception and movement), often another part can be trained to take over.

It takes diligent practice, sometimes over years. But scientists tell us that thinking and engaging in activity can physically alter the brain, a concept they call “neuroplasticity.”

“We now know that when we have thoughts, we rewire the so-called hardware in our brains,” says Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge.

And from these physical changes come functional changes. In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge writes, “I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see; another who enabled the deaf to hear. I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for 80-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were 55. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas.” These changes were brought about by repeated mental exercise.