The Brain That Changes Itself

A Woman Who Could Not Stop Falling

In 1997, a forty-year-old sales rep named Cheryl Schiltz was prescribed a routine antibiotic after a hysterectomy. The dose ran far above what her body could safely clear. The drug, gentamicin, wiped out almost the entirety of her vestibular system — the inner-ear apparatus that tells the brain which way is up. For the next five years, Cheryl lived inside a sensation that the floor was tipping out from under her at every moment. She described it as falling into an infinite abyss. She lost her job. She lived on a thousand dollars a month in disability. Doctors told her nothing could be done, because every neuroscience textbook said the same thing: when the brain's wiring goes, it stays gone.

Norman Doidge's book, published in 2007, is about why those textbooks were wrong. It is the popular work that more or less single-handedly pulled the word "neuroplasticity" into the kitchen-table vocabulary of curious readers, and it did so by stitching together patient stories and lab science from a small clique of researchers Doidge calls neuroplasticians — clinicians and scientists who spent decades arguing, often against their own field, that the adult brain can rewire itself, regrow function, and rearrange its maps long after childhood is over.

The man who fixed Cheryl was Paul Bach-y-Rita, a rumpled neuroscientist who wore five-dollar Salvation Army suits and drove a rusted twelve-year-old car. He spoke five languages and liked to say things like "We see with our brains, not with our eyes." His team built a hard hat with an accelerometer wired to a flat plastic strip studded with one hundred and forty-four electrodes. Cheryl placed the strip on her tongue. The electrodes mapped her head position into tiny electrical pulses she described as champagne bubbles. She closed her eyes. For the first time in five years, she stood still.