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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-04-27
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0td5aw1KXA
I want to share a little secret which I hope will not be a secret by the end of the talk I am truly madly deeply passionate about the human brain science has taught us but our brain shapes us that it makes us uniquely who we are and if we think about our brain it has two hundred billion neurons think about the world's population that's a mere
seven billion and we have hundreds of trillions of connections in our brain if we imagine all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy there are more connections in our brain than all of those stars combined so this incredibly complex organ that we carry with us everywhere we go it does shape who we are it as a filter at filters are perceptions and our understanding of ourselves
of others of our world and of our place in that world and what is incredibly amazing is no two brains are exactly alike if you look at the person next to you and you know all the physical differences between you the shape of your nose the color of your eyes your height there are more differences between your two brains than all of those physical differences in
combination so our brain does make us uniquely us and I'm here today to share with you my story and it's the story of how I came to learn that not only does our brain shape us but that we can actually shape our brain my story began in grade one and a great one I was identified as having a mental block I was told I had a
defect and I was told I would never learn like other children and really the message about time was loud and clear I was told I needed to learn to live with those limitations and this was nineteen fifty seven and it was the time of the on changeable brain and childhood was a profound struggle for me I couldn't tell time I couldn't understand the relationship between our
hand and the minute hand on the clock I couldn't understand language most of what I read or heard was really as intelligible as the Jabberwocky I could understand concrete things if somebody said to me the man is wearing a black coat I could paint a picture in my head and I could understand that but what I couldn't do was understand concepts or ideas or relationships so
lots of things were confusing I pondered how could my aunt also be my mother's sister and what did that fraction one over four really mean any kind of abstract concept was hard for me irony in jokes that was impossible so I learned to laugh when other people did cause and effect it did not exist in my world there were no reasons behind why things happened my
world was a series of disconnected bits and pieces of unrelated fragments and eventually my fragmented view of the world ended up causing a very fragmented sense of myself and that wasn't all this whole left side of my body was like an alien being I'm connected to the rest of me I would bang and bump into things on the left side of my body if I picked
up anything in this left hand I would drop it if I put this left hand on a hot burner I would feel pain but I had no idea where it was coming from I was truly a danger to myself my mother she was convinced I would be dead by the age of five and then if that wasn't enough I had a spatial problem I couldn't imagine
three dimensional space I couldn't create maps in my head I would constantly get lost even in my friend's house crossing the street instilled terror I could not judge how far away was that car geometry was a nightmare I felt incredible shame I felt there was something horribly horribly wrong with me and in my child's mind when I'd heard that diagnoses of having a mental block I
actually thought I had it wouldn't you in my head that made learning difficult and I didn't have a piece of wood in my head but I wasn't far wrong I had blockages as I was later to learn in very critical parts of my brain and I tried all the traditional approaches they were all about compensation and about working around the problem finding the strength to support
a weakness they were not about trying to address a source the problem and they took a heroic effort and led to rather limited results for me then great date I hit the ball I could not imagine how I could go on to high school and handle more complex curriculum the only option I could see was ending my life so I decided to end the pain and
the next morning when I woke up after my failed suicide attempt I berated myself for not even being able to get that right so I soldiered on and part of what kept me going was an attitude that I learned from my father he was an inventor and he was passionate about the creative process and he taught me that if there's a problem and there's no solution
you go out and create a solution and the other thing he taught me was but before you can solve the problem you have to identify its nature so I continued my hunt I went on to study psychology to try to understand what was wrong with me what was the source of my problem and then in the summer of nineteen seventy seven something life altering happened I
met a mind like my own a Russian soldier layover uses that ski the only difference being his mind was shaped by a bullet and mine had been that way since birth I met so that ski on the pages of a book the man with a shattered world written by the brilliant Russian no psychologist Alexander Luria as I read so that's the story he couldn't tell time
he described living in the dense fog all he got was fragments bits and pieces this man was living my life so now at the age of twenty five in nineteen seventy seven I knew the source of my problem it was a part of my brain in the left hemisphere that wasn't working and then I came across the work of mark Rosenzweig and he showed me a
solution Rosen tribe was working with rats and he found that rats in an enriched and stimulating environment were better learners and then when he looked at their brains their brains had changed physiologically support about learning and this was no plasticity in action Nora plasticity simply put the brain's ability to change physiologically and functionally as a result of stimulation so now I knew what I had to
do I had to find a way to work to exercise my brain to strengthen those weak parts and this was the beginning of my transformation and of my life's work and I had to believe that humans must have at least as much neural plasticity and hopefully more than rats so I went on to create my first exercise and I use clocks because clocks our former relationship
and I have never been able to tell time so I started with the two had a clock to force my brain to process relationships and then added a third hand and then a fourth hand because I want to make my brain work harder and harder and harder pull together concepts and understand their connection and about three to four months in I move something significant had changed
I'd always wanted to read philosophy and had never been able to understand it and I just happen to have access to a philosophy library so I went in and I pulled a book off the shelf and I opened it to a page at random and I read that page and I understood it as I was reading it this had never happened in my entire life and
then I thought maybe it's a fluke maybe that was just an easy book so I pulled another book off the shelf opened it read it and understood it and by the time I was finished I was surrounded by piles of hundred books and I had been able to read and understand each page so I knew that something had changed my experiment had worked the human brain
was capable of change and then I decided to create an exercise for that alien part of my body and for that I knew I had to work on an error in the right hemisphere the somatosensory cortex that registers sensation I created an exercise for that and I am no longer a danger to myself and then I decided that space a problem because I was really tired
of getting lost and so I created another exercise for that and I don't get lost I can actually read maps I don't like GPS is because I like to read maps now because I can %HESITATION so I knew now the brain could changed I was living proof of human neuroplasticity and what really breaks my heart is that I still meet people today children individuals that are
struggling with learning problems and they're still being told what I was told in nineteen fifty seven that they need to learn to live with their limitations they don't dare to dream and what I've learned since nineteen seventy seven when I met so that fee and Loria and Rosenzweig is that yes our brain does shape us it impacts how we can engage and participate and and be
in the world and every single one of us has our own unique profile of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and if there's a limitation we don't necessarily have to live with it we now know about neural plasticity and we can harness the brains changeable characteristics create programs to actually strengthen and stimulate and change our brain and in nineteen sixty six Rosenzweig threw down the gauntlet he said
his challenge was let's take what he'd learned with rats and apply it to human learning and we need to embrace that challenge we need to also challenge current practices that are still operating out of that paradigm of the un changeable brain we need to work together to take what we know now about neural plasticity and develop programs that actually shape our brains change the future of
learning my vision is of a world that we create in which no child house to live with the ongoing struggle and pain of a learning disability my vision is the cognitive exercises become just a normal part of curriculum my vision is that school becomes a place but we go to strengthen our brain to become really efficient and effective learners engaged in the learning process where not
