Originally created 10/17/01

Training can help overcome learning disabilities





It sounds provocative. But as Merzenich discussed the latest research at a National Institutes of Health meeting last week, neuroscientists said recent years have brought widespread agreement that the brain's "plasticity" - continual changes that let us learn new things every day - sometimes veers out of control, causing developmental disorders once attributed solely to bad genes.



Take vision. Newborns see very little. Day by day, messages beamed from the eyes to a region in the back of the brain literally hook up neural vision circuitry until babies can see normally. But studies of monkeys show patching over one eye makes the brain rewire itself to see only through the eye without the patch.




Merzenich's laboratory created computerized educational games to retrain sound-processing brain regions. The sounds may be drawn out until a child learns to recognize them and then gradually sped up to normal. Put children in MRI machines after about 60 hours of training, and the auditory cortex looks more normal. Tests show the children learn significantly better, too, Merzenich said.

Merzenich co-founded a California company that now sells the retraining games, called Fast ForWord, to schools and speech therapists.



How? He hasn't proved it yet, but his autism theory is that a brain region important for social development, the amygdala, gets bombarded with signals that it can't keep up with, and thus proper development is stymied. It's like a car getting stuck in the mud - the genetic predisposition - and revving the engine - the brain struggling to learn - just digs it in deeper. Redirect the stalled amygdala and maybe autism can be lessened if not prevented, he says.


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