Dr. Michael Merzenich is a pioneer in brain plasticity research. In this TED Talk, recorded in 2004, Dr. Merzenich describes impairments to the brain’s processing ability, and how we can train the brain back to normal processing:
We now have a large body of literature that demonstrates that the fundamental problem that occurs in the majority of children that have early language impairments, and that are going to struggle to learn to read, is that their language processor is created in a defective form. And the reason that it rises in a defective form is because early in the baby’s brain’s life the machine process is noisy. It’s that simple. It’s a signal to noise problem. Okay? And there are a lot of things that contribute to that. There are numerous inherited faults that could make the machine process noisier.
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Every sound the child hears uncorrected is muffled. It’s degraded. The child’s native language is such a case is not English. It’s not Japanese. It’s muffled English. It’s degraded Japanese. It’s crap. And the brain specializes for it. It creates a representation of language crap. And then the child is stuck with it.
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Now the crap doesn’t just happen in the ear. It can also happen in the brain. The brain itself can be noisy. It’s commonly noisy. There are many inherited faults that can make it noisier. And the native language for a child with such a brain is degraded. It’s not English. It’s noisy English. And that results in defective representations of sounds of words, not normal, a different strategy, by a machine that has different space constants. And you can look in the brain of such a child and record those time constants. They are about an order of magnitude longer, about 11 times longer in duration on average, than in a normal child. Space constants are about three times greater. Such a child will have memory and cognitive deficits in this domain. Of course they will. Because as a receiver of language, they are receiving it and representing it. And in information it’s representing crap. And they are going to have poor reading skills. Because reading is dependent upon the translation of word sounds into this orthographic or visual representational form. If you don’t have a brain representation of word sounds that translation makes no sense. And you are going to have corresponding abnormal neurology.
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The point is is that you can train the brain out of this. A way to think about this is you can actually re-refine the processing capacity of the machinery by changing it. Changing it in detail. It takes about 30 hours on the average. And we’ve accomplished that in about 430,000 kids today. Actually about 15,000 children are being trained as we speak. And actually when you look at the impacts, the impacts are substantial.
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Think of a classroom of children in the language arts. Think of the children on the slow side of the class. We have the potential to move most of those children to the middle or to the right side. In addition to accurate language training it also fixes memory and cognition speech fluency and speech production, And an important language dependent skill is enabled by this training — that is to say reading. And to a large extent it fixes the brain. You can look down in the brain of a child. in a variety of tasks that scientists have at Stanford, and MIT, and UCSF, and UCLA, and a number of other institutions. And children operating in various language behaviors, or in various reading behaviors, you see for the most extent, for most children, their neuronal responses, complexly abnormal before you start, are normalized by the training.
There’s some stuff about monkeys in the middle that went a little over our heads, but the talk is worth the 20 minute investment.
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