Rewired to learn: the woman who changed her brain

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young became an expert on the plasticity of our grey matter the hard way – by reprogramming her own malfunctioning brain.

By Ruth Laugesen In Science

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19th May, 2012

It wasn’t until she was 25 that Barbara Arrowsmith-Young stumbled across an explanation for why she had lived her life in a state of permanent confusion. She couldn’t understand conversations, she was baffled by written sentences until she had read them many times, and she couldn’t read a clock. Her struggles with learning had driven her to the brink of suicide. But by reading the account of a Russian World War II veteran, Lyova Zazetsky, she found her story. After Zazetsky suffered a traumatic injury to the left occipito-parietal region of his brain during the war, he could no longer ...

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