yeah, meir, great stry & i believe it!
 
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________________________________
From: Meir Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, November 8, 2008 3:06:29 PM
Subject: A brain's power to change

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/saturdayextra/story.html?id=7683d
e16-5ff8-4746-bef8-ecc3b041cc6a


Saturday > November 8 > 2008 
  
A brain's power to change
Back in September, one of the researchers who helped me with this series,
Alexa Tremblay left work early to visit a young relative in the hospital. It
was a radiant fall afternoon and the multicoloured foliage was blazing in
the sun. Alexa's friend Ben picked her up at our production office in the
Eastern Townships in a black Acura and they headed for Montreal.
  
ALBERT NERENBERG 
The Gazette 


Saturday, November 08, 2008


Looking on the bright side is no longer just an attitude, it's a science,
says filmmaker and former "angry young man" Albert Nerenberg, who now also
works as a "laughologist." Nerenberg tackles the upside of life in a monthly
Gazette series, Positivity.

Next month: Some answers.

- - -

When they came to a flashing yellow light at an intersection halfway between
Bromont and Knowlton, Ben stopped. Then he slowly pulled into the
intersection. To the right, at about 100 kilometres an hour, a 10-wheel
gravel truck materialized out of nowhere. Ben just had time to say, "Alexa,
there's a truck," and the truck's massive bumper broadsided the tiny car at
eye level. Alexa's head was driven into the side window as the car was
hurled across the highway. The car flipped ejecting the driver before it
rolled over and over again and landed in the ditch. The truck driver was OK.
The driver walked away in shock with a few bruises. But for Alexa, who was
trapped in the car, it was a different story.

It would take hours and the jaws of life to extract her from the mangled
wreckage. Eyewitnesses would later say they didn't expect her to survive.
Alexa would be rushed from hospital to hospital with a closed head injury.

When we got to intensive care, we saw Alexa knocked out cold. She was in a
coma and on a respirator. We were devastated. We weren't sure she was going
to live. It felt like our friend had just been murdered and we cried like
babies. The day before, Alexa had been singing and dancing to Estelle in the
office. Today, she was being kept alive by machines. The diagnosis was
unclear. There were no guarantees Alexa would even be waking up, but she was
young and healthy and had no other serious injuries, besides her head.

Seeing her, I felt powerless and slightly ridiculous. Sure, I'd been
researching and writing about the healing power of positivity. But faced
with something of this magnitude, it all seemed so silly.

Days passed and Alexa didn't wake up. Her body writhed and the only sign of
consciousness was the light flickering of her eyes behind her eyelids. She
seemed to be dreaming.

I called a friend who was a neurologist and told him the breakdown.

"It doesn't sound very good," he said. "If coma patients don't wake up with
in seven days, the odds they will ever wake up begin to drop drastically.
I'm so sorry."

The doctors called it diffuse axonal injury, a condition caused by a sudden
and damaging movement of the brain. On top of brain damage, it can also
result in death days or even two weeks after the accident. According to the
doctors, Alexa's brain had been impacted so hard its connection to her
nervous system had likely been effectively severed. It was impossible to
know how serious the damage was until she woke up. But for her to wake up,
her brain needed to reconnect. For Alexa to get better, it required her
brain to find a new way to work.

By bizarre coincidence, that had been the subject of discussions around the
production office before the accident. We'd all been reading and passing
around The Brain That Changes Itself, the breakthrough book by Canadian
psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge about neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the explosive new theory that brains - once believed to
be permanent and unchanging by nature - can change, heal and alter
themselves. I had planned to write about neuroplasticity for this series,
but gotten sidelined. Now, Alexa's life seemed to be depend on it.
Neuroplasticity is a concept pioneered by a number of scientists worldwide
and is revolutionizing the way we think about thinking.

In his preface, Doidge writes:

"The common wisdom was that after childhood the brain changed only when it
began the long process of decline. ... That when brain cells failed to
develop properly, or were injured, or died, they could not be replaced. The
theory of the unchanging brain decreed that people who were born with brain
or mental limitations, or who sustained brain damage, would be limited or
damaged for life. "

Doidge says he believes that harsh and limited view of the brain even
influenced our basic views of human potential.

"Since the brain could not change," he writes. "Human nature which emerges
from it, seemed unnecessarily fixed and unalterable as well."

But those scientists were wrong. Completely wrong. Brains can change in
unfathomable ways, some scientists now say and they are proving it. And
people can change, too. Even believing our brains can change, may itself
help bring about the change. A recent American study released in October,
demonstrated that a single neuron in a monkey's brain was able to rewire
previously paralyzed muscles. The process holds out hope as a potential
treatment for spinal cord injury and paralysis.

Doidge told me he was turned on to neuroplasticity when he came across a set
of "unexpected discoveries" that demonstrated "the brain changed its very
structure with each different activity performed. "If certain parts failed,
then other parts could sometimes take over."

That concept changes everything. It wasn't just a medical principle. It was
also a philosophical one. We are literally changing ourselves when we think.
We create new mental pathways and habits as we go, and that creates a
physiological transformation in the brain. Neuroplasticity suggests that
although it might be very difficult, almost any habit or addiction is
breakable. That people can truly re-invent themselves. That difficult
conditions might be curable and that people with serious brain injuries can
come back from seemingly impossible odds. In Alexa's case, that's what we
were hoping for.

At six days, Alexa still showed no sign of waking up. People who held her
hand would claim she had squeezed theirs, but she would never do it more
than once. We obsessed over what constituted conscious or instinctive
movement.

Some of the staff went to the scene of the accident. With distress, we saw
that the truck's burn marks on the highway only went about 20 feet. A little
research would reveal that this particular intersection, where Knowlton and
Brome Rds. meet, had been the scene of many accidents and a number of
terribly tragic deaths. Because the roads meet on hilly terrain, the
intersection plays tricks on motorists. There is a dip on the eastern
approach to the crossing that can momentarily hide a car, and in this case
possibly an entire truck. With the right timing, a vehicle could suddenly
appear apparently out of the blue, only metres away at full speed.

Alexa is beautiful, passionate and tough. The daughter of the late Edouard
Anglade, Quebec's first black cop, she had helped raise her younger brother
and sister. Alexa is also an excellent researcher and passionate thinker.
She has a piercing intellect, and the ability to break through the fog of
confusion that often surrounds an emerging story. Personally, I hoped that
quality would allow her a breakthrough.

We scoured online for Alexa's condition. One of the beautiful things about
the Internet is that it presents alternatives for almost every medical
situation. Even though our impression was that her care was excellent, the
doctors and nurses didn't know Alexa. We did.

I came across something called Coma Arousal Therapy on the Net. The therapy
was developed by Australian Dr. Ted Freeman who himself had been in a coma.
He questioned some common assumptions about the treatment of comas. Freeman
was one of the first to challenge the commonly held view that beyond basic
care, little can be done for the patient.

An unused brain quickly atrophies. Once stabilized and healed, a
brain-injured patient may not benefit from more rest, quiet and isolation.
The modern medical obsession with creating a sterile wall around injury may
not serve some brain damage well. Brains thrive off sense and stimulation,
which is food and water for neurons.

Coma Arousal Therapy is all about stimulation, be it sound, smell, sight,
touch or hearing. If a brain is road blocked by damage, giving it
alternatives, particularly unexpected ones, could open up detours. In
extreme cases, where patients still won't wake up, people are encouraged to
bang pots, bring in strong smelling flowers, sing songs, massage the person
hands, ask them questions, even read them poetry. The hope is that a diverse
and varied pattern of stimulation might allow the brain to activate new
links to the outside world and eventually bring the person back.

Alexa's family, led by her indefatigable mother Christine, surrounded Alexa
with constant love and attention. They talked to her and caressed her. They
washed her and massaged her. They did her hair and nails and stood by her
day and night. Her friends came and told her jokes.

The staff from the office brought in an iPod and loaded it up with some of
the songs Alexa had been singing and dancing to - just days before the
accident. We put earphones on her and turned it on. Alexa just lay there.
When Estelle's silky hit, American Boy came on, her body moved slightly and
her eyelids flickered. She moved. But that was about it. And the machine was
turned off.

On the seventh day of her coma, Alexa blinked. And, according to her mother
who was by her side constantly, she opened and closed her eyes at the
doctor's command.

Although she only did it once, we were ecstatic. Never had one blink meant
so much.

We would be disappointed over the next few days as little would happen, but
then about a week later, she opened her eyes again. She was blind, but it
was clear she was trying to see. She was distressed, and disoriented.

Although Alexa was under duress, she had briefs moments of consciousness.
She would turn in the direction of people speaking, and she would squeeze
your palm, locking the centre of her hand against the centre of yours. When
you watched her, you got the impression of someone underwater, desperately
trying to reach the surface.

Her friends crowded around her, talking to her, whispering, singing.

It became clear that Alexa could hear but could not see. One day I asked her
whether she knew why she was in the hospital. She replied, suddenly speaking
with absolute clarity: "No I don't." For half an hour, we talked in halting
tones about what happened.

Over the next while, Alexa showed increasing and seemingly deliberate
movement, but she was only moving one side of her body. Her right. Her left
arm hung limply. And even in a few short weeks, there were signs of atrophy
in her left leg.

- - -

One of the most intriguing triumphs of neuroplasticity involves the story of
Dr. Edward Taub. In his book, Doidge details how Taub's new approach to
dealing with strokes has potential to offer a revolutionary treatment. Taub
initially experimented on monkeys who had stroke-like conditions. Many had
the lost the ability to control one side of their body.

Medical science suggests that stroke victims rarely regain lost movement.
But Taub had a hunch: He believes that the brain when presented with the
trauma of a bursting of blood vessels has a shock reaction. It stops there
and the stroke closes off a whole section of a person's body. Stroke victims
are usually trained to work around their usually crippling disability.

Taub tried a seemingly bizarre experiment with the monkeys. He tied up their
good arms instead of their bad and an impossible thing occurred. In time,
the monkeys began to move their supposedly paralyzed arms. Taub had
demonstrated one of the remarkable aspects of neuroplasticity, the brain's
ability to work around roadblocks when motivated. Taub would later cure
strokes in some patients and his breakthroughs are influencing stroke
treatment worldwide.

- - -

I was on a shoot in the U.S. recently when I got a call from our office.

"Alexa called and left a message," said a new researcher.

"Sorry," I exclaimed. "There must be some mistake. You mean Alexa, Alexa?"

"Yes. There's a message from Alexa" on the answering machine.

Sure enough, there was. It was Alexa saying, "Hi."

When I got back, I headed into the hospital and there she was. Sitting in a
chair, smiling. She looked great. Her eyesight had returned and she spoke.
She told me that oddly enough, understanding neuroplasticity actually helped
her wake up. On some level, even in the feverish haze, it had given her
hope.

Alexa's left side was still weak but she demonstrated that she could now
roll her fingers, and tap her left foot. She had just woken up suddenly the
week before. No more drifting in and out of consciousness, and bit by bit,
her system was returning. Alexa was back.

"You've got to get me out of here," she said. "It's boring."

All I could say was, "Wow."

albert@ elevatorfilms.com

Alexa Tremblay is still in the hospital. She's making rapid progress and
doctors expect her to regain full use of the left side of her body. She may
be released within a few weeks.

C The Gazette (Montreal) 2008








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