Retraining the brain

Mental exercises can help kids overcome learning disorders

full text: http://www.msnbc.com/news/643185.asp?cp1=1#BODY

... Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has proved that special training, targeting specific brain regions, can help some children with dyslexia and other language-related disabilities to learn.

 IF IT WORKS for dyslexia, Merzenich reasons, why not for more profound neurological disorders like autism or schizophrenia? His theory: Such disorders aren’t simply inherited illnesses. Instead, they’re inherited brain weaknesses that turn into full-blown disorders only when the ever-changing brain essentially gets stuck in the wrong gear — and that might be possible to reverse.
       “There’s a real prospect of understanding these conditions through understanding the brain as an operational machine that in a sense creates its own capacities,” explains Merzenich, of the University of California, San Francisco.
       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.