Wanting desperately to do well, she got through elementary school by memorizing during lunch hours and after school. In high school her performance wa
The Brain That Changes Itself
Building Herself a Better Brain A Woman Labeled “Retarded” Discovers How to Heal Herself
The scientists who make important discoveries about the brain are often those whose own brains are extraordinary, working on those whose brains are damaged. It is rare that the person who makes an important discovery is the one with the defect, but there are some exceptions. Barbara Arrowsmith Young is one of these.
“Asymmetry” is the word that best describes her mind when she was a schoolgirl. Born in Toronto in 1951 and raised in Peterborough, Ontario, Barbara had areas of brilliance as a child—her auditory and visual memory both tested in the ninety-ninth percentile. Her frontal lobes were remarkably developed, giving her a driven, dogged quality. But her brain was “asymmetrical,” meaning that these exceptional abilities coexisted with areas of retardation.
This asymmetry left its chaotic handwriting on her body as well. Her mother made a joke of it. “The obstetrician must have yanked you out by your right leg,” which was longer than her left, causing her pelvis to shift. Her right arm never straightened, her right side was larger than her left, her left eye less alert.
Her spine was asymmetrical and twisted with scoliosis. She had a confusing assortment of serious learning disabilities. The area of her brain devoted to speech, Broca’s area, was not working properly, so she had trouble pronouncing words. She also lacked the capacity for spatial reasoning.
When we wish to move our bodies in space, we use spatial reasoning to construct an imaginary pathway in our heads before executing our movements.
Spatial reasoning is important for a baby crawling, a dentist drilling a tooth, a hockey player planning his moves. One day when Barbara was three she decided to play matador and bull. She was the bull, and the car in the driveway was the matador’s cape. She charged, thinking she would swerve and avoid it, but she misjudged the space and ran into the car, ripping her head open. Her mother declared she would be surprised if Barbara lived another year.
Spatial reasoning is also necessary for forming a mental map of where things are. We use this kind of reasoning to organize our desks or remember where we have left our keys. Barbara lost everything all the time. With no mental map of things in space, out of sight was literally out of mind, so she became a “pile person” and had to keep everything she was playing with or working on in front of her in piles, and her closets and dressers open. Outdoors she was always getting lost.
She also had a “kinesthetic” problem. Kinesthetic perception allows us to be aware of where our body or limbs are in space, enabling us to control and coordinate our movements. It also helps us recognize objects by touch. But Barbara could never tell how far her arms or legs had moved on her left side.
Though a tomboy in spirit, she was clumsy. She couldn’t hold a cup of juice in her left hand without spilling it. She frequently tripped or stumbled. Stairs were treacherous. She also had a decreased sense of touch on her left and was always bruising herself on that side. When she eventually learned to drive, she kept denting the left side of the car.
She had a visual disability as well. Her span of vision was so narrow that when she looked at a page of writing, she could take in only a few letters at a time.
But these were not her most debilitating problems. Because the part of her brain that helps to understand the relationships between symbols wasn’t functioning normally, she had trouble understanding grammar, math concepts, logic, and cause and effect. She couldn’t distinguish between “the father’s brother” and “the brother’s father.” The double negative was impossible for her to decipher. She couldn’t read a clock because she couldn’t understand the relationship between the hands. She literally couldn’t tell her left hand from her right, not only because she lacked a spatial map but because she couldn’t understand the relationship between “left” and “right.” Only with extraordinary mental effort and constant repetition could she learn to relate symbols to one another.
She reversed b, d, q, and p, read “was” as “saw,” and read and wrote from right to left, a disability called mirror writing. She was right-handed, but because she wrote from right to left, she smeared all her work. Her teachers thought she was being obstreperous. Because she was dyslexic, she made reading errors that cost her dearly. Her brothers kept sulfuric acid for experiments in her old nosedrops bottle. Once when she decided to treat herself for sniffles, Barbara misread the new label they had written. Lying in bed with acid running into her sinuses, she was too ashamed to tell her mother of yet another mishap.
Unable to understand cause and effect, she did odd things socially because she couldn’t connect behavior with its consequences. In kindergarten she couldn’t understand why, if her brothers were in the same school, she couldn’t leave her class and visit them in theirs whenever she wanted. She could memorize math procedures but couldn’t understand math concepts. She could recall that five times five equals twenty-five but couldn’t understand why. Her teachers responded by giving her extra drills, and her father spent hours tutoring her, to no avail. Her mother held up flash cards with simple math problems on them.
Because Barbara couldn’t figure them out, she found a place to sit where the sun made the paper translucent, so she could read the answers on the back. But the attempts at remediation didn’t get at the root of the problem; they just made it more agonizing.
Wanting desperately to do well, she got through elementary school by memorizing during lunch hours and after school. In high school her performance was extremely erratic. She learned to use her memory to cover her deficits and with practice could remember pages of facts. Before tests she prayed they would be fact-based, knowing she could score 100; if they were based on understanding relationships, she would probably score in the low teens.
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