The Brain That Changes Itself (4)

He worked with engineers to shrink the dentist-chair-computer-camera device for the blind. The clumsy, heavy plate of vibrating stimulators that had been attached to the back has now been replaced by a paper-think strip of plastic covered with electrodes, the diameter of a silver dollar, that is slipped onto the tongue. The tongue is what he calls the ideal "brain-meachine interface," and excellent entry point to the brain because it has no insensitive layer of dead skin on it. The computer too has shrunk radically, and the camera that was once the size of a suitcase now can be worn strapped to the frame of eyeglasses.

另类可穿戴健康仪器。

The Brain That Changes Itself (3)

Unlike most scientists, who stick to one field, Bach-y-Rita has become an expert in many --- medicine, psychopharmacology, ocular neurophysiology (the study of eye muscles), visual neurophysiology (the study of sight and the nervous system), and biomedical engineering. He follows ideas where they take him. He speaks five languages and has lived for extended periods in Italy, Germany, France, Mexico, Sweden, and throughout the United States. He has worked in the labs of major scientists and Nobel Prize winners, but has has never much cared what others thought and doesn't play the political games that many researchers do in order to get ahead. After becoming a physician, he gave up medicine and switched to basic research. He asked questions that seemed to defy common sense, such as, "Are eyes necessary for vision, or ears for hearing, tongues for tasting, noses for smelling?" and then when he was forty-four years old, his mind ever restless, he switched back to medicine and began a medical residency, with its endless days and sleepless nights, in one of the dreariest specialties of all: rehabilitation medicine. His ambition was to turn an intellectual backwater into a science by applying to it what he had learned about plasticity.

记录下来这一段，纯粹是敬仰一下这位牛人的追求和执行力！

Over the next few years Back-y-Rita began to study all the exceptions to localizationism. With his knowledge of languages, he delved into the untranslated, older scientific literature and rediscovered scientific work done before the more rigid versions of localizationism had taken hold.

五种语言不是白学的！

One of his papers was rejected for publication six times by journals, not because the evidence was disputed but because he dared to put the word "plasticity" in the title.

我简直有搜敛反publication证据的癖好了。

The Brain That Changes Itself (2)

Brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity. 

The architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes in the course of our individual lives.

Neuroplasticity has the power to produce more flexible but also more rigid behaviors --- a phenomenon I call "the plastic paradox." Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity. Once a particular plastic change occurs in the brain and becomes well established, it can prevent other changes from occurring. 

The Brain That Changes Itself (1)

One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior --- surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

如果是这样的话，一个人的意志或者态度真的可以治病，而不只是简单的影响病情的发展！但关键问题是大脑怎么知道which genes to turn on or off呢？