Brains not necessarily in the genes
 
  Washington - Do genes determine your brain's abilities, or can you retrain the
  brain to overcome inherited problems, such as helping a learning-impaired child
  to read? 

  Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has proved that special training, targeting
  specific brain regions, can help some children with dyslexia and other language
  -related disabilities to learn. 

  Sophisticated neural imaging shows the retraining, using computerised educational
  games, leads to physical changes in the brain. 

  If it works for dyslexia, Merzenich reasons, why not for more profound neurological
  disorders like autism or schizophrenia?

  His theory: Such disorders aren't simply inherited illnesses. Instead, they're
  inherited brain weaknesses that turn into full-blown disorders only when the ever
  -changing brain essentially gets stuck in the wrong gear - and that might be possible
  to reverse. 

  "There's a real prospect of understanding these conditions through understanding the
  brain as an operational machine that in a sense creates its own capacities," explains
  Merzenich, of the University of California, San Francisco. 

  Take vision. Newborns see very little. Day by day, messages beamed from the eyes to a
  region in the back of the brain literally hook up neural vision circuitry until babies
  can see normally. But studies of monkeys show patching over one eye makes the brain
  rewire itself to see only through the eye without the patch. 

  "It's a use-it-or-lose-it game during development," says Harvard Medical School's
  Carla Shatz. 

  Change isn't limited to childhood. Other scientists have painstakingly counted how
  many new brain cells grow in adult rats - very few if they're kept in plain boring
  cages but lots if they learn to use exercise wheels. In humans, brain-scanning MRI
  machines show regions involved in playing music, for example, grow and become more
  intricately wired as musicians practice. 

  Merzenich's laboratory created computerised educational games to retrain sound
  -processing brain regions. The sounds may be drawn out until a child learns to
  recognise them and then gradually sped up to normal. Put children in MRI machines
  after about 60 hours of training, and the auditory cortex looks more normal. 

  Tests show that children learn significantly better, too, Merzenich said. Merzenich
  co-founded a California company that now sells the retraining games, called Fast
  ForWord, to schools and speech therapists. 

  More intriguing are severe disorders like autism or schizophrenia. Clearly genes
  alone don't determine who gets those diseases, because 15% of identical twins of
  autism patients escape the disorder, as do half of identical twins of schizophrenics.

  10/17/01 
  AP

  http://www.planetsave.com/ViewStory.asp?ID=1507

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