The future is plastic
"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics."
Mr. McGuire to Dustin Hoffman
from the opening scene of The Graduate
As students of the human body, we try all sorts of methods to increase our understanding and performance. We read, we train, we go to seminars and listen to one another. But sometimes a story comes along that is so powerful that it trumps all our ordinary searching and drives our knowledge deeper, transcending dozens of textbooks and seminars in a single leap.
One such story comes to us in The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, M.D. Doidge is a psychiatrist and a researcher whose primary interest is the plasticity of the nervous system.
In his book, Doidge tells the story of a neuroscientist and rehabilitation physician named Paul Bach-y-Rita. In 1959, Bach-y-Rita's father, then sixty-five years old, had a stroke that paralyzed his face and half his body. It also left him unable to speak. Experts advised that there was no hope of recovery, but Bach-y-Rita's brother George-then a medical student-refused to accept the prognosis and brought his paralyzed father from New York to Mexico to live with him. He then began a grueling, innovative rehab program.
Fortunately, George knew nothing about standard rehabilitation practices and so began a creative, functional hands-on process of his own. He started with the basics, by teaching his father to crawl. It was a struggle from the very beginning, requiring constant physical support and hands-on attention.
After a few weeks, his father was able to support himself in a crawling position and make forward progress by supporting his weak side against a wall in a hallway. This training went on for months. In addition to basic locomotion, George initiated children's games on the floor, rolling marbles and picking up coins. "Everything we tried involved turning normal life experiences into exercises," he said.
George then began instructing his father in the act of scrubbing kitchen pots in a sort of "wax-on, wax-off" kind of drill. The strong hand holds the pot, the weak hand traces the rim. Over and over, fifteen minutes clockwise, fifteen minutes counter-clockwise. (George was a taskmaster!) The weak arm could scarcely execute the movement, but the rim of the pot gave him a target to focus on.
Little by little, the father's condition improved. Over the course of months, he progressed to the point of standing and then to walking. After about three months, speech started to return and later, a desire to return to writing. At first, he could only use one finger on the keyboard, holding his finger over the desired key, then dropping his entire arm in one crude motion. After learning to control this motion, he learned to drop only the wrist, then just the fingers. Eventually, he learned to type normally.
At the end of a year, his recovery was so complete that he was able to resume full-time teaching at City College in New York. He loved his work and continued teaching until he retired at seventy. But then he took another teaching job, remarried and continued working, hiking and traveling for seven more years. He eventually died of a heart attack–while climbing mountains in Columbia at 9,000 feet.
If the story ended here, it would be plenty remarkable in its own right. The tenacity, the creativity, the inevitable frustration, the outrageous success in the face of crushing adversity–these are all dramatic elements that deserve our attention and admiration. But for students of the body, the story gets even more interesting.
The year was 1965, and in those days, autopsies were routine. The son was called to the hospital to review the results and when he arrived, he could see slices of his father's brain spread out on the exam table. After one glance, he was completely astonished. The slides showed an enormous lesion in his father's brain, damage from the stroke that had never healed.
Incredibly, the father's brain had simply bypassed the damaged area and reorganized itself through other channels. When pressed to perform new activities, the brain engineered a series of work-arounds, re-routing sensory and motor commands around the damaged area. Cells that had originally performed other functions were recruited to new tasks. Through training and challenge, the father's brain had figured out a way to re-wire itself.
Homo plasticus
The story of Bach-y-Rita's father is breathtaking and inspiring. Clearly, this man was a champion of adaptability, a plastic superhero. But let's not get sidetracked by this remarkable individual. This story, dramatic as it is, threatens to obscure the fact that these kinds of plastic changes in the body are absolutely commonplace.
That is, plastic changes go on constantly in the human nervous system, especially when we challenge ourselves with new activity. We are forever re-wiring ourselves to adapt to new conditions. For creatures with complex nervous systems, plasticity is the norm. And for primates with over-sized brains, plasticity is a way of life.
the plastic path
The plasticity of the nervous system is a fascinating study and we could easily get lost in the details. We could even become neural nerds, studying the chemistry of genes, proteins, dendrites and membranes, trying to figure out exactly how plasticity works. But let's forget all that for the moment and bring our attention to the basic experience of living in a demanding, frustrating and challenging modern world.
Ultimately, plasticity of the nervous system becomes a metaphor for how we might live better, more functional lives. What really matters here is the life-lesson. Suppose that there's an obstacle in your life, a frustration, a stumbling block. You can fight it directly if you choose, but if that doesn't work, you can seek the work-around. Re-wire your perspective, your orientation to some new path.
Or, suppose you have the equivalent of a "broken blood vessel" in your life, something that causes a "lesion" and a loss of functionality. You've suffered a crisis or loss and now a big piece of your life isn't working.
You could dwell on that fact. You could accept the grim prognosis that your situation is static and futile. You could complain and curse your fate. You could give up.
Or, you could start crawling. You could start by getting yourself up on all fours and see if you can make it down the hallway. Lean against the wall if necessary. Do it every day. Push yourself. Go right up against your limits. Try new movements and new behaviors. Challenge your brain, your body and your spirit to re-wire itself. Work around the "lesion," whatever it might happen to be. Harness whatever capacities you've got and recruit them into the effort. Take heart in the fact that, as long as you're alive, your body will be looking for a path, a way to generate the action that you're asking it to perform. On any given day, you won't really notice much of a difference, but after a few months, you'll be up on your feet, walking around and chasing your dreams.
