Rewired Brain
I think I have mentioned that I am taking a course on "Understanding the Brain" on DVD through The Teaching Company. The brain and its functioning fascinates me and with the enormous strides that researchers have made in the last decade have left what little knowledge I had on the brain grossly inadequate. I also am interested in the topic for philosophical and theological reasons. The more that we learn, the more the tendency by at least some scientists to reduce "the mind" to the biological firing of neurons, to the brain, as renowned Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker does.
In any case, the HealthScience section of today's Boston Globe has an interesting article, "Brain Power," in it. Samantha Parma is a 16 year old who suffered a prenatal stroke which affected the functioning of most of the left hemisphere of her brain which controls speech, some language and some vision abilities, as well as controlling the right side of her body. Doctors tried to prepare her parents to expect a child of greatly diminished abilities.
However, while she has experienced some diminishment in certain abilities, for the most part she is like a normal teenager. The reason for her to live a normal life is her brain's ability to rewire itself. Because the stroke occurred before birth, the neural circuitry is more plastic than after birth and was able to do some adapting. She has gone through thousands of hours of doctor's appointments, and speech and physical therapies to arrive at where she is today.
Neuorscientists don't understand well how the rewiring works at this point, but hope to learn in the future so that they can help adults who have strokes regain abilities that they lose. It is a daunting task when you think about it. I learned in the course I'm taking that neuroscientists estimate that the brain is constituted by 300 billion neurons (brain cells) and that there are 300 trillion interconnections between them. The neural pathway that connects the left hemisphere of the brain to the right, the corpus callosum, contains 300 million axons (part of the neuron). So the challenge to understand all of this is daunting, to say the least.
The more I learn about the brain and its functioning, the more in awe of God's handiwork I am. I'm glad that we have made the kind of progress in our understanding of the amazing brain that Samantha is doing as well as she is.
In any case, the HealthScience section of today's Boston Globe has an interesting article, "Brain Power," in it. Samantha Parma is a 16 year old who suffered a prenatal stroke which affected the functioning of most of the left hemisphere of her brain which controls speech, some language and some vision abilities, as well as controlling the right side of her body. Doctors tried to prepare her parents to expect a child of greatly diminished abilities.
However, while she has experienced some diminishment in certain abilities, for the most part she is like a normal teenager. The reason for her to live a normal life is her brain's ability to rewire itself. Because the stroke occurred before birth, the neural circuitry is more plastic than after birth and was able to do some adapting. She has gone through thousands of hours of doctor's appointments, and speech and physical therapies to arrive at where she is today.
Neuorscientists don't understand well how the rewiring works at this point, but hope to learn in the future so that they can help adults who have strokes regain abilities that they lose. It is a daunting task when you think about it. I learned in the course I'm taking that neuroscientists estimate that the brain is constituted by 300 billion neurons (brain cells) and that there are 300 trillion interconnections between them. The neural pathway that connects the left hemisphere of the brain to the right, the corpus callosum, contains 300 million axons (part of the neuron). So the challenge to understand all of this is daunting, to say the least.
The more I learn about the brain and its functioning, the more in awe of God's handiwork I am. I'm glad that we have made the kind of progress in our understanding of the amazing brain that Samantha is doing as well as she is.
posted by UCC Medfield at 9:14 AM
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