I have been quite astonished lately to read a number of accounts of nerve rewiring that work. Nerve rewiring is about taking some nerves from a distinct region to rewire a region that has been cut-out for some reason. And suppose the brain will make sense of the change to regain functionality.
It starts to become a way to treat people with damage to their spine (like here) and also a way for amputees to operate their prosthetic limb (like here and here in the Economist in 2010).
I read the most bizarre account of such a possibility in Scott Adam‘s (the cartoonist creator of Dilbert) latest book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘. Scott Adams has been suffering from a condition called spasmodic dysphonia: his vocal cords did not respond in a normal manner when speaking in public. A very debilitating condition, and Scott Adams could not find any solution for years. The full account is also in this Wired post. Finally the solution was found when a surgeon proposed to reroute some neck nerves with other functions to his vocal chords. Suddenly after 3 months, as predicted, after his brain had learnt to use these new entry points, Scott was able to speak again, and after some exercise, regained his voice.
All these experiments prove that our brain is able to relearn and rewire at all ages, and keeps an astonishing plasticity to adapt. We need to stop believing these industrial age cliche that our brain is formed in our 20s’. It continues to evolve, and can even manage dramatic changes, any time during our lives.
