And one and two and one and two

Update on exercises, brain plasticity and all that...
Still slogging through the Wii 30 day challenge although it kills me for the day after each exercise session - and I deleted squat jumps out of the plans for yesterday as my knees felt this was altogether too much to ask. Still, my running is getting better and I can smash the targets in boxing...
So today, as my body needs rest, I thought I would try exercising my brain - and ooh, is it rusty! I know I've been choosing simpler books to read and avoiding mental challenges but I didn't know my slumming had had such an effect. I signed into a site by Luminosity: http://www.lumosity.com/ and signed up for their 7 day free trial of the games.
They are great - much better and more challenging and also cuter than the ones on Brain Age 1 and 2. You do math, identify things through memory, create words, match shapes and colours. Most of the games are a bit like the Swope test - you have to do two things at once, and the results highlight how your brain reacts to these two demands.
For example, in one game, you must click on a spot where a bird appears while remembering the letter that appears at the same time. The letter is put into a hangman-type format and you can guess the bird's name or fill it all in with "snapshots" (each bird you click uses one shot). Sometimes, while looking for the bird, you forget to look for the letter. Or you just see an edge of it. You get higher points for clicking more accurately on the bird and for solving the puzzle earlier.
Or there's the penguin maze puzzle, which I found really hard. You are racing another penguin through a maze to catch a fish (it seems nice that the other penguin moves so slowly except when he beats you and you feel very stupid) - using the arrows on your computer to direct your little penguin. The trick? The maze rotates and you have to remember the orientation of the penguin with relation to the arrow on screen to use your arrow keys successfully. I got completely confused and couldn't make my mind figure it out, no matter how hard I tried. But the penguin is cute when it catches the fish and oh so sad when it loses it so I'll be back and try again.
Math is done with raindrops...each drop has a puzzle in it and you must solve it before it adds to the pond. Sundrops come along that evaporate all the raindrops. This one I'm sure I will get after more practice - it seems when I don't do math regularly, I really forget sums and etc.
After each puzzle you are given a rating, and if you fill out your profile, you can be compared to others your age. It was quite terrifying today for me - I was only in the 38th%tile or so overall. The program rates you on several parameters, so it's easy to see where you might need more practice.
After the 7 day free trial, signup is around $10 a month or less if you subscribe for a year or more. They add new puzzles all the time and the site is backed by research.
I'm hooked. I'll keep up for the next 7 days and if it continues to be as interesting, challenging, and fun as today was (I could feel my brain aching!), I'm going to sign up.
But for now, I am taking my aching body and mind for a rest.
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Exploring hope

Way back in high school, I taught myself "advanced Placement" Biology - the course that was supposed to get you out of the first year of University Biology. There were no classes available, but I had an understanding teacher to mentor me and I did well enough to pass the exam and get the credit. What I remember most of that course was my dissection of a fetal pig. I worked my way through the poor piggy's body, but the biggest day for me was the day I dissected the brain. I felt reverential, although piggy's brain hadn't developed much in its fetal life. But I knew then I was touching something magical, holy, beyond understanding.

Since then I've had a fascination with neuroscience, which seems oddly appropriate given my MS. Sometimes I think the body knows what is happening to it before it shows clinically...I adore reading and studying about the marvelous things our brains are, the PET scans that isolate areas of response, the amazing system that takes a few chemicals and uses them to regulate everything from scratching our noses to singing to figuring out our taxes to thinking about God. It is astonishing.

I just opened a book by Norman Doidge, MD, called "The Brain that changes itself" - all about brain plasticity and the miraculous way brains can, if not heal, redirect their energies to covering for lapses. The first story almost made me weep. It's about a man who had a huge stroke and was rendered immobile and speechless. He was taught to reorganize his brain by his son, who spent hours teaching him to progress as children do - crawling to walking, sounds to short words to long sentences. This alone was wonderful. But when the father died, several years later, on a mountain climbing expedition (!), the autopsy showed that over 90% of the nerves through his brainstem, that most important of parts of the brain (The bit that regulates basic functions, balance, breathing, etc.) had been destroyed by the stroke - the lesion was still there and had not healed, but the brain was able to work around this damage.

Inexplicable, and thought impossible. So many stroke sufferers are given the standard 4-8 weeks rehab and then left to live with what they have left at that time. But both this story and the tale of Jill Boldt Taylor's stroke recovery prove that this is not enough. More recovery can happen...

So of course, this being an MS blog, it does occur to me that some of the same things should be possible for MS sufferers. But how to work with this changing disease to reroute what must be, essentially, like construction season in Canada - pylons up everywhere, sections being repaired in unusual locations, new areas of destruction created daily, slowdowns and big lumpy bits. It's an interesting thought. Can we create side paths, detours, that would allow nerve impulses to wend their way around the changing landscape, and if so, how?