From Britain’s Telegraph
Here was a young couple driving home through Hancock Park, a well-heeled suburb of mansions and manicured lawns. Lewis was a thriving film producer of 36, best known for the huge comedy hit Look Who’s Talking, starring John Travolta, and Marcy, 27, was in marketing. They’d been married five months.
Then they were T-boned in a traffic accident.
Doctors deemed his cognitive function so low it was untestable – that is, an IQ below 50. It was likely, they said, that he would have to rely on others for even the most menial of tasks for the rest of his life.
But
But then his recovery began. It has been a long road, littered with surgeries, and even now it isn’t over – but, today, Lewis has not only regained most of his cognitive function, he actually has an IQ as high as the one he had before the crash. He is an extraordinary medical phenomenon and gives hope to all those facing similar challenges.
Read it and hope.
Especially:
Until relatively recently neuroscientists believed each part of the brain had a well-defined, unchanging role; if it was damaged there was little you could do about it, you just had to learn to live with it. But it is now widely acknowledged that the brain is more versatile than that and that, with the right sort of cognitive training, it is possible to persuade other areas of the brain to take on, at least to some extent, the tasks formerly carried out by those areas that have been damaged. More
This recently recognized brain tendency (neuroplasticity) could become quite important in addressing dementia, a common problem for the increasing numbers of very aged people, and early life disorders like delayed development (retardation).
Follow UD News at Twitter!