coyote: brain fitness frontiers has been made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. coyote: science is equal parts creation and discovery recent advances in neuroscience have shown that our brain is and always has been a dynamic organ, constantly changing as we move through life. the brain of every human changes itself through neuroplasticity. scientists have now unconvered ways to harness this powerful ability to achieve radical transformation

in the lives of people everywhere. join us as we explore the incredible promise and how scientists, technologists, psychologists and medical doctors are creating solutions and changing people's lives in previously unimaginable ways. science is poised to change the way we learn, the way we age and the way we heal, on the cutting edge of brain fitness frontiers begley: there had been a long standing idea that the adult brain just cannot change in any fundamental way, but then there began to be studies that suggested in fact that dogma was completely wrong and it just opened up a world of possibilities. coyote: using the brain's own ability to change is called neuroplasticity, and neuroscientists are pushing the boundaries of what was once considered the realm of science fiction. merzenich: neuroplasticity provides a basis for what we are, because each time we acquire a new skill or a

new ability, each time we learn some new thing, each time we improve our ability we're actually changing our brain. our brain is plastic, it's constructed to change and the accumulation of those changes really define who we are, what we are, what we can do, what we can't do. de charms: we do know that the brain is an organ that is designed to change. the brain is an organ that is designed for plasticity. so we hope that using its own capability it may be possible to change it in quite dramatic ways. dr. frackowiak: everything that we do, everything that we learn, every experience that we have changes the way our brain works. coyote: in order to better understand the function of plasticity within the brain, neuroscientists utilize the latest tools in brain imaging. techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fmri, have opened up entirely new understandings of the physiological transformations of the brain scientists at the wellcome trust centre for neuroimaging undertook

an unusual study to better grasp the function of a part of the brain called the hippocampus. frackowiak: the hippocampus seems to be very central to memories in general the reason for that is its connections for the whole of the cortex. dr. merzenich: on the hippocampus we're you're hanging memories on a curtain of time and place. we're constructing a world in which we locate things in their three dimensional in a three dimensional realm. and we're also constructing things in the complex passage, domain of the passage of time. coyote: dr. frackowiak and his colleagues were interested particularly in visual memory and its relationship to the hippocampus. to explore this association, they had to find the right test group. after much searching, they discovered the perfect population was right outside their door. [scooter noise, music] dr. frackowiak: we were talking about memory and down the road were coming these little scooters with plexiglas fronts with a map and these are guys who are training

to get their taxicab license. gary: when you're on the knowledge of london the way you study the streets of london, is you physically go out on your moped following a set route. and then you have to learn that set route. you have to commit that set route to memory. and obviously the best way to do that is to call over. teacher: london business school to the thistle selfridges hotel. off you go. i want the call. go. student: i'm gonna leave this on my right at sussex place and go right into outer circle. leave it by (sigh) frackowiak: in fact, they're learning the whole geography of london. and then, suddenly, click. my god. visio-spatial memory. these guys have to remember things in space, relations in space.

they have to remember routes. it appeared that we had a captured population and we had people who were at various stages of learning about the geography of london. coyote: when someone studies for the london taxicab drivers license, they are said to be "on the knowledge." that achievement involves spending sometimes 7 days a week for 3 or 4 years -- recording the street directions, and geography in the incredibly complex metropolis that is london. teacher: so, basically what we've done from devonshire street we've used devonshire place mews to cut through to marylebone high street. [music] dr. frackowiak: and at the time we were just introducing into the lab a new technique for analyzing brain images. would it be possible that taxi drivers who spent at least eight hours and probably more per day finding their way around a very

complex environment would actually, through time, change the structure of their brain? a real form of plasticity, environmentally driven. coyote: neurologists know that a critical area in the back of the hippocampus is specifically related to orientation. dr. frackowiak: if you get a stroke in this area you just wipe out your memory for space. you have just, as you lose yourself in your own home. for these experiments, we were hitting on the same area. and so it became clear that that was firstly, a critical area for this type of memory. but secondly that environment seemed to be playing a role. we made a correlation between how long you'd been in the profession and how large this part of the hippocampus was on the right side. and it was a clear relationship. the longer, the bigger. gary: it's always nice to know that i've got something bigger than everybody else has got. coyote: but, size isn't everything.

brain structure volume is only a fragment of the whole story. benasich: i think we have gotten very comfortable with talking about individual brain areas particularly since the advent of fmri, because it's like, "oh my heavens look at that that has lit up! that's exactly where it's going on. but we really need to remember that the brain is very interconnected and that there's lots of information moving back and forth that's true for the hippocampus also. i mean you can have memories even if you destroy most of the hippocampus. coyote: further insight into memory was uncovered when that very event occurred. dr. moffett: so, there's this guy who was one day found wandering along the side of the highway and the state policeman who picked him up asked him his name and he gave his name and said that he was stationed at a nearby army base and gave his age as 22 years old. and i don't know if the officer realized it or

not but he must have appeared at least a decade older than that because he was and he didn't live at this army base anymore although he had been stationed there when he was about 22. and it turns out that he had just lost all of the memories of the last 11 years. gone! he didn't remember that he had had two kids. he thought that his wife was still just about to have the first kid and he had no memory of the second child, no memory of his post-military career, nothing. and it turned out that he had a cyst that was pressing on the conduit between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. once the cyst was drained, all of his memories returned. what this is.. is a really rare living example of the the most interesting thing i think about the hippocampus and memory which is that for memories that are what they call declarative -- meaning memories that you can talk about, what i had for breakfast or where i was born.

these memories are initially brought into the hippocampus it is only after time that they are sent out to the cortex. coyote: as with the wellcome centre's study, neuroimaging processes help unveil some of the secrets of brain activity. a group of researchers led by dr. christopher decharms are investigating the use of real-time fmri to help patients suffering from debilitating chronic pain. decharms: we have been studying chronic pain patients, and we've asked the question whether a patient can learn to control the areas of their brain that produce pain, and the areas of their brain that turn off pain, and thereby whether they can learn to control their pain experience itself. so the way that we do that is that we present the patients with images, with ongoing video, live video from inside their own brain, as it were.

and we ask whether they can learn to control the processes in their own brain that make the pain go up and make the pain go down. and, if they can, we hope that they're going to be able to control their pain itself. coyote: dr. decharms and his team are developing a new strategy called neuroimaging therapy that attempts to accomplish this task. decharms: neuroimaging therapy is the approach of measuring the brains activation in real time, live action, second by second, and presenting that information to a person, or a patient, so that they can try to learn how to control and understand their own brain activation. coyote: watching the brain activation allowed the researchers and the patients to gain insight into what mental strategies could be used by that individual to control their pain. decharms: while the patients are in the scanner they watch through goggles images, computer displays of their own brain activity,

but we don't show it to them in a way that looks like a brain. we show it to them in video displays that look intuitively understandable. so for example, we may take brain region corresponding to pain and when the regions activity goes up we show a flame getting larger and larger in video. when the brain activation goes down we show the fire getting smaller again. the reason we do that is we want the patient to be able to have a realistic and intuitive depiction that allows them to quickly understand what's happening in their brain processes. coyote: as the patient learns to control the flame on screen, they are also learning to control their own brain, targeting and driving their plasticity to control their pain. decharms: we think it's possible that strategies that produce short-term changes in pain, moment by moment, could be different from the strategies that produce enduring changes in brain activation and in pain. and that's one of the reasons that being able to see

the brain processing that's happening, as it were, behind the curtain of pain may allow people insights in how to control their own pain. coyote: chronic pain is a disorder that destroys the lives of millions of people in the united states and worldwide. most patients who have chronic pain never find adequate relief from the existing medications and existing treatments. decharms: there's a built-in dial, as it were, in the brain, that, when you turn it up, the pain goes away. and so we hoped that we could teach people to control these brain systems, to take control of this dial for themselves and make their pain go down. one of the key aspects of plasticity is that activation in the brain that's repeated again and again and again, produces enduring change. you can use the metaphor of a river carving through a valley til you get a deeper and deeper valley and eventually a canyon. well, chronic pain is potentially one of the most extreme cases. if you have pain that's going on moment after moment,

day after day, and the same process is being activated in the brain repeatedly, you can produce enduring change in the brain. merzenich: when you have chronic pain, you don't think about it, but actually you're in a learning mode about your pain. pain is very important to you and the brain wants to know about things that are painful. the more important it is to you the more you learn it and you grow it. and after a while it's grown to such an extent that you don't really need to have the present pain in order to feel it, and some people historically would say, "well that's mental", but it's not mental. it's actually physically changed your brain through learning. you've learned to feel continuous pain. decharms: one of the things that's very challenging for many pain patients is they say, "my family doesn't believe me. my physician may not believe me. i'm not even sure i believe myself, because i've had this experience of pain for so long. but there's no physical manifestation that anyone can see." by looking inside their brain, they feel, many patients have told us they feel, very empowered

by being able to see, potentially, the physical substrate, the physical cause that leads to their pain. we hope that we can take that process of plasticity that carves pathways in the brain and reverse it or change it, and that we can produce enduring changes in the brain's pathways related to pain, the pathways that produce the experience of pain and by changing those pathways we can change the clinical experience of pain in patients. and that that can be a long term enduring change for them, we hope. coyote: while this work shows enormous potential for the future, the research is ongoing. dr. decharms and his researchers are at the forefront of neuroimaging therapy that may one day answer some of our most pressing questions about the intersection of brain and mind. other research focusing on the thousands of victims of balance loss, sometimes called "wobblers",

uses neuroplasticity to address the loss of the vestibular system in the brain. lori: four years ago, i had viral meningitis and encephalitis. i was in a coma for 10 days. i almost died. and, um, i was in the hospital for a month and then came home and learned how to do everything all over again and went for balance testing and found out that i had lost the vestibular system on the right side of my body. coyote: the vestibular system is a part of the brain in combination with the cochlea that comprises the labyrinth of the inner ear, which contributes to the perception of self-motion, head position and spatial orientation relative to gravity. lori: the best way i can describe it, when you're standing and you have a vestibular problem, is it's like being on a boat in the middle of a lake. when you're sitting,

it's almost like when you have windshield wipers on in your car and they need to be changed because there are too many, too many streaks. coyote: researchers at the university of wisconsin-madison, led by the late neuroscientist paul bach y rita, pioneered a breakthrough therapeutic device harnessing the power of plasticity to address loss of balance. this research led to the development of the brainport balance device which converts information about body position into electrical stimulation on the tongue. skinner: when you use the brain port, it provides that information for you, so you get trained to use that information as if it were your vestibular system. doidge: what you would do is take a piece of plastic about the size of a piece of chewing gum that had about 100 different little dots on it which were electrodes and you'd put it on your tongue and they'd give you the tiniest shock so that when you tilted forward you would feel as though

there were champagne bubbles on your tongue sort of running to the front part of your mouth and when you tilted back they would move back and to the left and to the right and so on. coyote: a user of the brainport balance device trains their brain to understand where they are in space and eventually help them restore normal balance. the researchers found that this effect continued even after the user stopped actively using the device. this created a residual effect which allowed the patient to lead a more normal life. lori: i walked in with a cane because that's what i needed so that i could compensate for no balance on the right side. and after several days, i didn't need the cane anymore. and my youngest daughter who was in ecuador, had called to find out how i was, and i had told her that i no longer needed the cane and she started crying on the phone. coyote: vestibular problems are not limited to just the thousands of wobblers. balance issues are of tremendous importance

to an aging population. recent surveys in the new york times have shown that the elderly are more afraid of falling than being mugged. doidge: when we walk our brains are very very actively involved in processing us and orienting us. older people will often be watching their feet as they're walking down the stairs and because it's a use it or lose it brain, that may not be the best way to go about things. because as you start to rely more on your vision for balance, you're not using your actual balance system. coyote: as we've seen, plasticity can be used for powerful changes or positive plasticity. sometimes, in the older brain the exact opposite can occur, and we witness the ravages of negative plasticity. merzenich: if i fall when i'm older, and i realize i couldn't stop myself from falling, i'm really worried about that. so what do i do? the first thing i do is i turn my head down, i start watching my feet. that's a very negative step.

the first thing that's bad is that, i've used my organ of balance from the beginning of time in my life, in this position, and i get pretty good information with this. this is where i'm an expert. now, i'm watching the ground and somebody bumps me. because i'm looking in near vision the ground sweeps past me like lightening. so, as soon as i'm bumped, my eyes tell me i'm moving over and they carry me right to the ground. what i'm saying is you actually learn in lots of ways, inactively to drive things negatively so that you're less capable, so that you're less versatile, so that you're less agile mentally and physically. coyote: the effects of negative plasticity are wide-ranging, but they can often be countered by positive plasticity, with learning that fosters positive brain change. as we've seen, neuroscientists on the frontiers of brain fitness continue to find new ways

to use technology to maximize positive plastic change. when we come back we'll see how that positive plasticity has helped people recover from stroke and traumatic brain injury, as brain fitness frontiers continues. merzenich: people think of cognitive training as something esoteric for people that's in real trouble, right? but it's actually for every person, it's actually a way that every one of us can be stronger, every one of us can be better, every one of us can be more capable, more confident. babette: hello, i am babette davidson and we are here to ask for your financial support of programs just like this one that entertain, enlighten and engage. only public television provides you with programming like this that can, quite literally, change your life. the dollars that we raise are vital. they represent the venture capital that allows us to produce and acquire the programs that you see here all year long. what you've seen so far may all seem like incredible science, but pbs is giving you a way

to bring that science into your home and into your life. the future is now when it comes to helping your brain. when you contribute at the 60 dollar level, we'll send you a dvd of the program you have been watching: brain fitness frontiers, which includes extended interviews with scientists featured in the program. when you can pledge at the $120 level we'll send you the complete brain fitness dvd library which includes the brain fitness program, brain fitness 2 and brain fitness frontiers. a complete view of neuroplasticity-the science behind it and how it can be used to change your life. when you pledge at the 200 dollar level we'll send you a brain fitness:sight -- a single user cognitive training program on cd-rom, designed to improve the function of your brain. in clinical trials it speeds up visual processing by up to 300%. you'll see more, react faster and improve your quality of life with brain fitness: sight. the cognitive training exercises

in brain fitness sight will challenge you and entertain you but most importantly it'll drive your brain fitness in a very positive direction. exercises include birdwatcher, road trip and jewel diver. or, if you're able to flex your financial muscle for this station and your own brain fitness, contribute at the $365 dollar level and we'll send you the complete brain fitness package. it includes the dvd library, brain fitness sight and an additional cognitive training program called brain fitness sound. to achieve widespread brain fitness you must work out different areas of your brain. brain fitness sound improves your brain's auditory processing and improves the quality and quantity of information that you hear, helping you to focus better. this thank you gift joins brain fitness sound with brain fitness sight, which helps reawaken your visual system. together, they'll help you notice more, think faster and react more quickly.

the two cognitive training programs are on a cd-rom for a single user and available for both the pc and mac. the exercises are scientifically proven to benefit your cognition. now the full retail value of these gifts is over 650 dollars, but it's available exclusively through your pbs station for your $365 dollar pledge. and when you contribute at any of these levels, you'll also receive the e-newsletter, brain fitness news. at whatever level you can give, we appreciate your support. your brain fitness is just as important as your physical fitness and both require exercise to remain in tip-top shape as we age. mary: i turned 60 last year and i was feeling the word that comes to mind is a little fuzziness mental fuzziness. and a little lack of clarity. um i also found that uh, i would forget things.

i couldn't remember where i put something. i wasn't feeling on top of my game. i've had periods when i was very on top of my game so i knew the distinction and it just seemed like a really good time to see if there was something that couldn't be done about that. i could see that it was making a big difference. it certainly was making a big difference to me, i mean, i just walked in cheerful and ready to hit the next benchmark. babette: mary found that the results of cognitive training were life-changing and long-lasting. mary: it's definitely lasted. i certainly would like to do something again you know, in a couple of years, just to keep sharp to keep, see what else is out there. i happen to be hitting this at a time when the folks are doing brilliant work at brain fitness and other places so i -- i'm all for availing myself to see where, where it'll take me. i mean you know

i think we, as we get older we have a lot more wisdom to share. i'd like to be somebody who feels capable of sharing that wisdom. dr merzenich: well think about how you,how you operate at your present age, let's say that you're 50 and i'm thinking back to how things were for me when i was 40 or maybe how they were when i was 30. and i recognize almost immediately that there have been losses, there have been changes. i know that there have been some things i'm better at now, i know more now. i know things now that i didn't know then. but i also know that there in, in a very fundamental and simple way, i'm not performing with the efficiency i'm not performing with the accuracy. i don't remember enough. maybe i'm not thinking as fast. maybe i'm not moving as fast. you know, even satchel paige had to retire because ultimately, his movements were just too darn slow and discoordinated. right? every one of us slows down, and an important point is that the rate at which we slow

is subject to challenge and we can challenge it through intensively re-engaging our brain to think faster to act more competently and accurately. basically, to remember more. and that's what it's all about. we can actually, at any point, move ourselves in effect, back on our time trajectory in our performance abilities. so that basically we can perform as if we were younger. and we know increasingly that the processes that cause this deterioration are reversible processes. babette: pbs wants to help you make your brain stronger and more fit while you help us make this station financially stronger with your contribution. remember at the 365 dollar level we're offering the complete brain fitness package. all of the dvds of the 3 shows in the brain fitness series and two cognitive training programs, brain fitness sight and brain fitness sound, which have been scientifically proven to help you think faster, focus better and remember more.

if you were to buy these programs anywhere else, they would cost you over 650 dollars but they are available to you exclusively at 365 dollars from your pbs station. please go to the phone and make that commitment to your brain health and to this station's health. and now, more brain fitness frontiers. coyote: the principles behind neuroimaging therapy and sensory substitution devices utilize the power of the mind to change the brain. on the frontier of brain fitness in the lab of dr. john donoghue at brown university, scientists are actually working to physically and directly hard wire the brain to the external world with the brain gate pushing the boundaries of the possible. donoghue: brain gate is a type of neural interface that is designed to restore communication and mobility between the brain and the outside world

for people who have tetraplegia, or paralysis. what brain gate does to take signals from the brain to the outside world is it starts with a tiny sensor a tiny chip about the size of a baby aspirin that's implanted onto the surface of the brain that picks up neural signals called action potentials. and these electrical impulses come outside through a plug on the head, currently that goes out to a cartful of electronics that processes the signals and interprets them or decodes them and transforms them into a command signal and the simplest one is you think about moving your hand control a mouse, signal left or go right and those signals come out of your brain and the computer interprets them as mouse commands for a computer and a cursor on the screen goes left or goes right. coyote: using this technology, dr. donoghue has made it possible for someone with tetraplegia to actually control a computer. his studies using direct connection to the brain with technology

continue to delve into how the brain can change its own abilities, its plasticity. donoghue: and we expect the brain will learn how to transform itself to better control that small number of neurons that we're requiring to perform all these complicated functions. this will be essential when controlling something as complicated as a robotic arm, for example, that has all kinds of motions possible what can you really do? can you learn to control these complicated functions by changing your brain? coyote: the braingate is a unique device, as it merges technology and the brain in a surgical process, keeping large computer technology external to the patient. but as dr. donoghue moves forward in his research, he envisions an even more incredible future. donoghue: what we're trying to do is come up with the brain phone, in a sense. the brain phone would mean that we take all of that cart of electronics and all of the necessary automation and processing so that a person with