Crashing Into Potential. Scott B Harris
how little anyone actually knows about the brain. For a long time, scientists have had the notion that the brain is fixed and unchanging. As time goes on and we put the puzzle together, new science tells us that the brain does indeed change. This is called neuroplasticity.
Vic picked up the book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge and couldn’t put it down. It is about the phenomenon of neuroplasticity and how the brain can change its structural formation and function, when it was once thought to be static. It was thought that when a part of the brain dies, it’s dead, but we now know through science that the brain will form new connections between neurons (brain cells) when other parts are damaged or dead. The brain is like a super computer with no manual. It is very powerful, but we know very little about it. We humans are slowly but surely writing our own instruction manual on how we think it works.
My family now had hope for my recovery. Not a full recovery, but at least partial. To help me along this path, the medical staff explained to my immediate family that when they visited I should have as little stimulation as possible at first, to give my injured brain a chance to recover, and later I needed positive stimulation. Knowing that people wanted to visit me the staff told them that the right way to stimulate my injured brain was to ask me positive questions in a positive way that would make me think.
Positive stimulation is good for anyone’s brain, especially an injured brain. Knowing this, it became a ritual to do a Sudoku puzzle with my dad. A Sudoku is a number puzzle that generally comes in three levels: easy, medium and difficult. Doing these puzzles together was fun. It kind of felt like Dad was sitting down with his son to read him a bedtime story and in some ways, it was. It really felt like I was a child again and I had to start from scratch. We started off on the easy ones, with my dad looking over my shoulder and pointing to the boxes and basically giving me the answers in a very discreet way – ‘No it’s not four, that was close. I’ll give you a hint: it’s above five and below seven.’ Having this help meant that I did not get these wrong, which gave me encouragement. Doing these puzzles became such a habit to me that in later years I would be able to sit down and do these on my own, without Dad’s help.
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