I've Got My Hand In Your Head: Neuroscience / Music Monday Combo

I have just finished a fantastic book called The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. Perhaps surprisingly for someone with no knowledge of science at all (Physics GCSE and that's it), I am a real neuroscience nerd, and love nothing more than curling up with a good book all about horrific brain injuries. Cosy, eh? On my shelf you will find classic neuroscience tracts by the likes of Oliver Sacks, Steven Johnson and Paul Broks, and I impulsed-purchased The Brain That Changes Itself whilst hanging out in Waterstones before a meeting, and proceeded to inhale the whole thing over the weekend.

Basically, you should stop reading my review now and read the book instead. But seeing as how you are here, TBTCI is a fascinating exploration of the key emerging concept in brain science of neuroplasticity - the idea that far from being a fixed machine which, once damaged, cannot be repaired, the brain is a fluid, living entity where different functions compete for space. The things you do remap your brain; the things you do a lot remap your brain a lot. (I'm simplifying a tad.) And parts of your brain that might usually do one thing are capable of doing others, particularly if trained in the right ways, which gives immense hope to those who are brain damaged, by birth, accident, stroke and so on. Some of the stories here are, no pun intended, mind-blowing: from a woman born retarded who cured herself, to another who was born, and lives and functions, with only half a brain.

This then gives hope to those of us who are not brain damaged but who might have behavioural patterns we are unhappy with. By repeating the patterns, we've worn tracks in our minds which are hard to get out of, which explains why we keep doing the same harmful things over and over. But like any other kind of damage, we can train and practice and get our brains onto a better path. (When I say we, I do mean me, by the way, though perhaps you will recognise yourself also.) Does this sound self-helpy? It isn't meant to. More that the book provides a deep insight into what it actually means, at the level of your personal brain chemistry, when you think of who you are and what you might be trying to change. (There I go with you. I still mean me.)

It's utterly inspiring stuff. Though as a caveat, you will have to have a high tolerance for vivisection, as the researchers in the book are constantly severing monkeys' spinal nerves and sewing kittens' eyes shut. If you like the sound of it - the book, not the vivisection - there's more on the author's website and the book is available in all the usual places. Also, can we pause for a moment to admire this author photo, taken by Denise Grant? This is what a psychoanalyst should look like, no?



All this makes me think about how I'd like to read more non-fiction. I didn't go near the stuff after school and university because I thought it would be all like textbooks, but in recent years I've found I've missed all the learning I took for granted when I was growing up, and now I want to find out more about this world of ours, goddammit. (Not god damn the world. That would be a foolhardy invitation. It's just an expression.) Dearest blog friends, can you recommend some great non-fiction for me to read? Other books on diverse factual topics that I've read and loved have included The Shadow of the Sun (Kapuscinski), Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Biskind), The Age of Absurdity (Michael Foley) - that may be one for another blog post, in fact, so brilliant is it. But in the meantime, recommendations please.

Have just realised it's Monday. So here's a themed Music Monday - Hand In Your Head by Money Mark. Here's a fact for you: the first time I heard this, I thought the lyrics were "I've got my hand in your hair and I'm pulling out all of your mites."

Beautiful Minds: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have a new heroine. Her name is Jocelyn Bell Burnell and she is a very famous scientist. Not famous enough, obviously, for me to have heard of her, but then the only living scientists I have heard of are Stephen Hawking and Stephen Hawking, and as it happens Stephen Hawking (or a photograph of him, anyway) turned up in last night's fantastic TV documentary about Jocelyn Bell. Bell's work discovering the existence of pulsars paved the way for Hawkins's black hole theory to gain greater credence, basically. So Bell made Hawkins, AND SHE CAN BREAK HIM JUST AS EASILY. *DEMONIC LAUGHTER*. Oh sorry. Got distracted. It's sunny in my office, what can I say.

To return to the point, Bell was the subject of the first episode of the BBC4 series 'Beautiful Minds', profiling great scientists. As a Phd student in the 1960s, Bell first built and then scanned the results of Cambridge's Cavendish Lab's new radio telescope, a fantastically strange creation involving lost of poles in a field linked by miles and miles of wire. (It took Bell the first two years of her Phd just to assemble the thing.) The telescope produced 94 feet of readings a day, all of which had to be manually scanned by Bell, readings which were constantly being scuppered by interference from pirate radio stations, police radios and the like. But amongst all this, Bell noticed a quarter inch of slightly divergent results. She pushed and pushed for these results to be investigated, against her supervisor's insistence that it must just be more interference. Eventually she demonstrated that the "interference" was in fact a star that was sending out pulses of radiation. As her supervisor excluded her from meetings to discuss the implications - was the pulse a signal from space aliens, and what should be done about it if so? - she persisted in her work, discovered another pulsing star, and the rest is history, and physics, and Nobel prize glory! But not for her. Don't be ridiculous. It was her (male) supervisor - the one who didn't believe her findings - and her (male) head of department who were awarded the prize, something that Bell appears remarkably sanguine about.

Bell was a terrific interviewee, endearingly modest about her achievements and yet justly proud of what she had done. She was brilliantly articulate, and her face spoke as much as her words. Her eyes shone as she spoke of human beings as being made of the same stuff as the stars; her face fell into still-smarting hurt as she described her isolation as a physics undergraduate, the only girl on her course, greeted by whistles and catcalls as she walked into lectures; she was moved to tears as she remembered her school physics teacher's pride in her success. Contrast her appallingly smug supervisor, who lacked the grace to acknowledge Bell's contribution to the Nobel-prize winning work, saying that he was the captain of the ship and it didn't matter who the crew was. Bell's contemporaries remember it differently, saying that perhaps only one scientist in a hundred would have noticed and acted on the anomaly that Bell spotted.

It was a simply-made, absorbing documentary, punctuated with well-chosen archive clips of scientific films from the 1960s, and blissfully free of dramatic reconstruction. If you're in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer here.