

We are a continuous work in progress,” the doctor said. “Within your brain, in your lifetime, are approximately 4 quadrillion moments of change in which your brain is defining you. But he pointed out that the processes that control brain plasticity are all reversible. “Whether you’re 30 years old or 70 years old, you can still learn at the same rate,” said Merzenich. Lastly, the brain rewires itself and affects physical and chemical things happening in the body. The brain grows in power like the body and should be exercised through continuous learning. The other two points Merzenich made are commonly understood today by many. “We are constructed to be engaged,” he said. Two, putting the brain on idle will distort its experiences. One, many factors can arise in life that actively degrade brain performance and health. The doctor shared four important lessons about brain functioning with the students. “We as a society wait for the disaster before trying to understand.”


“Society is at fault for its failure to understand or try to understand the human brain before the disaster,” he said. He thinks children should be taught to understand how their brain functions. The neuroscientist doesn’t agree with using prisons. “It’s not the child’s fault if he grows up to commit a felony,” said Merzenich. He is also co-writing a book with Merzenich that is set to be released in 2023. During his time in prison, Wildes was able to get on the road to recovery and is now free, working to help others. Merzenich said Wildes suffered from a serious brain injury as a result of the beatings he took from his father. Tamalpais College students in attendance. “What does your brain have to do with breaking bad,” he asked the 30 Mt. Wildes came close to killing his own father and ended up spending 23 years in prison for his violence. Merzenich said this abuse amplified Wildes’ inability to care about others. Wildes was physically abused by his father as a child. To emphasize his point, Merzenich shared the story of his best friend, Lyle Wildes. “No one is more in need of help in America than those millions of individuals identified as offenders by the American criminal justice system,” he said. It also fails to take an offender’s backstory into account. Merzenich, the justice system is a failure because it fails to identify neurologically struggling youth before throwing them into jails or prisons. Merzenich holds more than one hundred patents and has been quoted in over one hundred books.Īccording to Dr. He also received numerous other awards in his field including the Russ prize, Zulch prize and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award. Merzenich was awarded one of the world’s top neuroscience prizes, the Kavli prize, for his achievement in the field of brain plasticity. He made significant contributions to the cochlear implant that helps people recover language and sound recognition.
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Merzenich is the founder of Brain HQ by Posit Science, a program that teaches people how to train their brains. “It’s not right to judge everybody by the same rules neurologically,” he said. The doctor is the author of several books, including Soft Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life. “Our justice system is neurologically brain dead,” said Merzenich. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, told Mount Tamalpais College students that the criminal justice system doesn’t pay enough attention to how the human brain operates. One of the leading pioneers in brain plasticity research visited San Quentin to promote his idea for criminal brain system reform.ĭr.
