A Woman Perpetually Falling

"A Woman Perpetually Falling" starts off by describing a woman who has no sense of balance, and therefore always feel like she's falling, even when lying down. She can't walk, can't even stay upright, without losing her balance and falling. Then, she begins working with Dr. Bach-y-Rita, who has designed a hat which acts as a temporary vestibular system (sense of balance). Surprisingly, when she takes off the hat, she retains that sense of balance for some amount of time- an amount of time that increases each time she uses the hat. Dr. Bach-y-Rita ascribes this to neuroplasticity, explaining that the brain is forming new pathways which grow stronger each time that she puts the hat on and uses the pathways. Neuroplasticity, though not a new concept, has only recently come to be accepted by the scientific community; previously, scientists believed that there was one and only one location in the brain for each function, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. However, as Bach-y-Rita discovered, the brain can often reorganize itself.
This was very interesting to me, especially because we have just been learning about functions of different parts of the brain in class. However, after reading through the article, I realized that those locations were probably where those functions are primarily associated with those locations, but could also take place in another part of the brain if necessary.

There were some quotes that stuck out to me in the reading. The first was that the hat, the machine that allowed the woman to recover her vestibular sense, helped "to reinforce the signals from her healthy tissues. He [Bach-y-Rita] thinks the machine also helps recruit other pathways." I thought this was interesting because the hat was such a simple device- it used electrodes on the tongue which told the woman which way she was leaning- and yet it had such dramatic effects on her brain.  The second quote that stood out to me was that localizationism "went from being as series of intriguing correlations (observations that damage to specific brain areas led to loss of specific mental functions) to a general theory that declared that every brain function had only one hardwired location." This was interesting because science is supposed to be open-minded and accepting of change, but this theory completely shut out the idea of neiroplasticity, even though the observations it was based on did not disprove the idea. I was also intrigued by an experiment in which a scientist rewired the optic nerves of ferrets to go to the auditory cortex. He found that the auditory cortex reorganized itself to process sight, and "though the ferrets that had this surgery did not have 20/20 vision, they had about a third of that, or 20/60- no worse than some people who wear eyeglasses." This implied that while a reorganized structure of the brain works, it doesn't work quite as well as the original structure, which would mean that although neuroplasticity clearly exists, the typical locations of specific functions are still important.