1Rewiring Your Gray Matterby Sharon BegleyJanuary 01, 2000 Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! booms the cartoonish little ringmaster on the computer screen. Welcome to the Circus Sequence game! Although it has all the earmarks of a typical educational CD, once Circus Sequence and the other six games that make up Fast ForWord get past the words of welcome, they sound decidedly odd-and for good reason. The players are otherwise normal children 4 to 14 who cannot distinguish between similar short sounds, like da and ka. They have trouble linking written words with sounds, and therefore with learning to read. So when the computer asks the players to point to rake when a picture of a lake is also offered, or to release the cursor over a flying pig when a series of spoken gs is interrupted by a k, it stretches out the target sounds. The usual .003-second difference between day and bay, for instance, lasts several times that long. And with this simple trick, Fast ForWord does something quite a bit more revolutionary than your run-of-the-mill educational CD: it rewires brains.In 1989 President George Bush signed a resolution declaring the 1990s the Decade of the Brain. Neuroscientists lived up to the advance billing. In the 90s they used neuroimaging to locate regions of the brain associated with everything from recognizing faces to playing Tetris. They linked genes to mental illnesses and to Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons. They discovered molecular changes that underlie memories. Of all the finds, though, one is rewriting the textbooks. It is the dawning realization that a brain older than three years is not the rigid structure that scientists long thought, but a malleable, plastic organ. Ever since the 1950s one of the great themes in neuroscience had been that neurons in the cortex matured during a critical period in the first few years of life, and that the brains organization did not change much after that, says neurobiologist Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco. But a flood of discoveries shows that the brain continually reorganizes itself. Its called neuroplasticity. And it means that you create your brain from the input you get, says Paula Tallal, codirector of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.Creating brains: neuroscientists are not immune to millennium dreams. They imagine that in the new century they will master directed neuroplasticity, that is, they will figure out what sequence of specific inputs changes the brain in desirable ways. Through special brain exercises, they hope, they will be able to untangle our circuits to relieve depression, cure learning disabilities, rehabilitate stroke victims, postpone the worst of Alzheimers disease-even undo the brain wiring that supports racism. With hardly a glance back at A Clockwork Orange, they foresee astonishing possibilities for teaching old brains new tricks. Says Jon Kaas of Vanderbilt University: Once we understand the mechanisms of neuroplasticity, we could give 2people the tools to maximally alter their brains in ways they want.Improved learning based on neuroscience may be the first dream to be realized. Educators, for the most part, ignore (or are ignorant of) the mechanisms by which the brain changes so that it is capable of, say, deductive logic. But make no mistake: the brain capable of logic is physically different from the brain that is not. Tallal and Merzenich figured out that a brain that cannot recognize the differences between the sounds of gee and key, or zip and sip, is different from a brain that can. With Fast ForWord, made by Scientific Learning Corp., they set about changing the brain so that it recognizes such lightning-fast phonemes. Some 500 school systems have bought the program, and 25,000 children have been trained on it for 100 minutes a day, five days a week. After six to eight weeks, 90 percent of the kids who complete the program made 1.5 to two years of progress in reading skills, says Tallal.They hope to exploit brain plasticity for other kinds of learning. Just as we can now fix the brains way of connecting oral language with the written word, so I think we will find the keystone that underlies mathematical ability, Merzenich says. Ultimately, this strategy will lead to neuroscience-based education. In 10 to 15 years this will be everywhere, and every school will be able to deliver help based on brain plasticity.Learning doesnt mean only academics: neuroplasticity might become the latest weapon in a coachs arsenal. Highly precise, patterned movements, whether dribbling a soccer ball or driving a golf ball 200 straight yards, seem to arise from dedicated brain circuits. When researchers led by Leslie Ungerleider at the National Institutes of Health scanned the brains of people who were tapping their fingers in a complicated sequence that they had practiced for w