Snippets from: The Brain that Changes Itself
I just finished reading The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. This book taught me about 50% of what I know about the brain.
If you haven't seen me lately, don't even talk to me about the human brain because it's my favorite topic and I won't stop talking for hours. I could talk about neuroscience about as long as I can complain about the improper use of typefaces.
As I read this book I highlighted interesting snippets (while resisting the urge to highlight entire pages). Here are some of my favorites:
An unspoken and yet profound aspect of our well-being is based on having a normally functioning sense of balance. (pg. 2)
The balance system gives us our sense of orientation in space. Its sense organ, the vestibular apparatus, consists of three semicircular canals in the inner ear that tell us when we are upright and how gravity is affecting our bodies by detecting motion in three-dimensional space. One canal detects movement in the horizontal plane, another in the vertical plane, and another when we are moving forward and backward. (pg. 3)
For people, postmortem examinations have shown that education increases the number of branches among neurons. An increased number of branches drives the neurons farther apart, leading to an increase in the volume and thickness of the brain. (pg. 43)
[Dr. Michael] Merzenich discovered that [brain] maps are neither immutable within a single brain nor universal but vary in their borders and size from person to person. (pg. 49)
While you can learn while you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain. (pg. 68)
... "gross motor control," a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility. Aside from the failure of the vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet. According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brains. If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces. Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat. This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control. Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves. By resorting to these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline ... As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we're not getting much information from our feet. (pgs. 90-91)
I should stop now before I re-type the entire book.
