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402 days. 402 (plus or minus… mostly minus) posts.

Category: People

December 5, 2012

Day 11: Head to Toe

Last week, I started a series of posts about “people you should know.” Technically, it started with one person, but no one called me out on the fact that there is no such thing as a series of one. Now that there are two people, it’s official! (Related: There is no such thing as a “first annual” event. Don’t even try it. I won’t go.)

Matthew Sanford

Sanford is a yoga instructor. He teaches all types of students from all walks of life, all over the country. He is often quoted as saying, “Your body is the best home your mind will ever have, and it’s the only one you get.”

Sanford’s home/body is that of a paraplegic. He became paralyzed from the chest down during a car accident at age 13. In “Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence,” (a phenomenal book) Sanford describes his spinal cord injury as fundamentally a mind-body injury—one that is experienced internally as a separation between self and body. His journey to reconnect to his paralyzed body, rather than overcome his injury, brought him to yoga at age 25.

If all you know about yoga is that it can be a little mushy (love all beings, live in the present, breathe, etc.), think about this: yoga is hard. It’s strenuous and frustrating. Focusing on pressing through the heel, engaging the inner thighs, breathing smoothly, not thinking about grocery shopping, not thinking about not thinking about grocery shopping, etc. is hard enough with all limbs intact. What does a person do when he’s asked to press though a heel he can’t even feel?

Through years of continued practice and a few harrowing setbacks (he once broke his femur while trying an advanced yoga posture), Sanford learned how to live in his body and engage his mind in the experience. As he healed, he began teaching adapted yoga classes to students with a wide range of abilities and impairments. In “Waking,” Sanford writes, “I teach them the subtleties of sensing energetic sensation, about moving inward and connecting through their bodies on a level that includes the silence, and it works! They experience gains in strength, balance and flexibility. They too gain a measure of calm and a feeling of wholeness. The practical benefits of energetic realization are not just flukes of my particular experience.”

In 2001, Sanford founded Mind Body Solutions, a nonprofit dedicated to “transforming trauma, loss and disability into hope and potential by awakening the connection between mind and body.” Currently, he teaches a form of yoga developed by B.K.S. Iyengar, who said, “When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.”

For more from Sanford in his own words, check out The Body’s Grace, Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with him from May 2012.

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November 29, 2012

Day 5: Your Brain on Brain

Since I have a luxurious 397 blogs to go, I’m starting a series of periodic posts about “people you should know.” Real people; not made up ones. I might start a series of made up people at a later date.

This particular person passed away in 2006, so you missed your chance to meet him. However, you can still learn about, appreciate and be fascinated by his work.

A caveat: I’m not a scientist. If I write something inaccurate and you know better, feel free to let me know (in a nice way, please…. all caps are no fun).    

Paul Bach-y-Rita (1934–2006)

Bach-y-Rita, one of the “fathers of neuroplasticity,” was one of only a handful of early neuroscientists who believed in the adaptability of the brain. Just a few decades ago, neuroplasticity was a fringe theory. The brain was thought to be hardwired—fixed—and could not create new connections. On the contrary, Bach-y-Rita knew that the brain was alive and constantly adapting to new stimuli.

“We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brains.”

Bach-y-Rita coined the concept of sensory substitution—that if one of our senses is damaged, we can acquire the missing information through another sense. He posited that when a person became blind or deaf, they hadn’t necessarily lost the ability to see or hear; they only lost the ability to transmit information from their eyes or ears to their brain. A brain without a working set of eyes could potentially still “see” with another transmitter.

Drum roll for one of our more amazing organs, please: the tongue.

Save the lips, it has more tactile nerve endings than any other part of the body. Knowing this, Bach-y-Rita invented a “tongue display,” a thin strip of plastic covered with electrodes that lies on a person’s tongue. The device is hooked up to a camera, and as the camera reduces what it sees into pixels, the pixels are converted to electric currents that run along the tongue strip. The brain learns to interpret the impulses it receives on the tongue as a visual picture of the environment. Watch it in action (and ignore the hokey background music).

This is a very tiny taste (heh) of his work. Prior to creating the visual device, he used the tongue strip to help patients with severe balance problems recover from vestibular damage. Want to get down and dirty with some electrotactile vestibular substitution neuroscience? Read the NIHPA journal article on the BrainPort® balance device, submitted by Bach-y-Rita and his collaborators.

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