The article that we were tasked with reading for homework was, yes, about a woman who was always falling without outside stimuli, but more importantly about the findings of Paul Bach-y-Rita in succeeding to treat the patient in an era when this was believed to be impossible. Cheryl, the patient who suffered from the lack of function in her vestibular apparatus that controls balance within the body, was able to undergo a nearly complete rehabilitation in her vestibular sense thanks to the "training" from Bach-y-Rita's innovative machine that taught her brain's healthy tissue to take on the job of vestibular function. This breakthrough essentially disproved the widely popular localization theory of neurology and assisted in Bach-y-Rita's goal of employing the brain's natural plasticity to rehabilitate and treat patients of all kinds of their afflictions.
Up until his pioneering idea about plasticity in the brain became solidified in scientific theory, the explanation for how the brain worked had long been established as "localization", or the idea that a brain has specific parts that have specific functions to help us control our body as a whole, which perpetuated the belief that once a part of the brain was in dysfunction or even missing it could never be replaced, and the patient would be a lost case. Bach-y-Rita was determined to reevaluate the way neurologists and scientists handled the rehabilitation of patients with various dysfunctions of the brained thus conducted one of many tests with the intent of assisting those who were a "lost cause" due to the impact of the localization theory.
One quote that I found to be informational and interesting was that "to decode theses skin sensations and turn them into pictures...the brain has to learn something new, and the part of the brain devoted to processing touch has to adapt to the new signals". The author was talking about how the type of receptor used by the blind(in this case, their touch with a cane) does not matter as much as the way that the brain responds and uses those signals to assist itself. I found this interesting because I had always wondered how canes help the legally blind "see", and Paul Bach-y-Rita was able to support how instead of memorizing the array of things in a room, they are able to orient themselves by teaching their brain to read the signals of touch for vision.
Another quote that really hit home for me was when Doidge mentions, "[Bach-y-Rita] began to conceive of much of the brain as "polysensory"--that its sensory areas were able to process signals from more than one sense". This was really cool to me because I did know how taste and smell were related to each other, but the idea that senses such as sight and hearing could also be associated was really novel.
Finally, the ending sentence of this reading that concludes,"[Nature] has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself". This quote really resounded with me because of how nicely it summarized the entire idea of this reading, which is how the brain can adapt to fit different conditions in people who have various changes in the makeup of their brain and the effectiveness of its parts. The brain is able to exchange functions between parts if needed, as also seen in the "Woman With a Hole in Her Brain" reading that we had read previously.
No comments:
Post a Comment