The magic of brain power

I’m driving along the freeway in a snowstorm, and suddenly up ahead, brake lights are reaching back to me like so many bloody dominoes. Without willing it to happen, I see myself stalled here for at least a few minutes, maybe an hour, maybe all stupid night.

I am an adult man. I am impatient. I want answers.

Again, without my willing it to happen, I am plotting alternate routes. My brain, that shadowy decision-maker behind the curtain of my cranium, instantaneously takes control: I can turn off at the next exit, zip three miles north, then find that road I once took in college, then turn – no wait – I’ll go south, then … the plans surge and sort themselves out even though I’m not consciously creating them. I don’t need to. My impatience, a flaw I constantly am working to correct, creates the connections I need to find the best route through a world that constantly is working to thwart my progress.

There’s magic in those connections.

Bruce Kaufman, unlike me, is a brain surgeon. Also unlike me, he doesn’t make swift, impatient decisions. When he sees a problem, he steps back and requires his brain to come up with a logical, life-saving solution.

Kaufman is the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, and when he tells me he could cut out the part of my brain that controls speech and I’d never speak again, I believe (and sort of fear) him.

I am stunned when he says he could do the exact same to an infant, and that child might one day speak. It makes me think of 3-year-old Jordan Ellenbecker, who is the reason my thoughts turned to brains in the first place. Jordan has cerebral palsy, and he suffered a stroke, the most likely reason he could not speak much before last summer.

The difference, Kaufman said, between the brains of an adult and a very young child is in the wiring, or nerve cells. Adult brains are pretty much hardwired, and when that current gets cut, that’s the end of that. In children, the wiring is still getting set up, so if the original route gets blocked, there’s a decent chance the kid’s brain will rewire itself in time.

And timing is what draws me to Jordan’s story. He got addicted to a nearby construction site last summer, and his intense connection to the trucks, colors, action and people helped him break through whatever roadblock was keeping him from speaking. By the end of his experience, he was piecing together syllables, words and even some sentences.

Kaufman offered two theories for Jordan’s development. First, Jordan’s disabilities caused a developmental delay, but his steps toward speech were going to happen anyway, no matter what he saw. Second, the construction site gave Jordan the new experience he needed to speed up whatever rewiring was taking place in his brain.

I don’t disagree with Kaufman. He’s a brain surgeon.

But I know, and Kaufman agreed, there’s a lot we don’t know about the human brain. That’s what gives me pause, not because the lack of a clear-cut reason should in any way dampen Jordan’s happy progress, but because there’s a crossroads of persistence and providence that can’t be explained by basic biology.

And maybe there is no explanation. I’m guessing Jordan would say he doesn’t need one.