DALLAS - By the time Scott Hayner was 7, he had had one skull fracture and three major concussions from falling off horses.
Nobody connected those accidents to the difficulties he had in school as he acted out, stopped talking for three months and cried every day for two years. As an adult, Hayner, who lives in Highland Park, Texas, seemed to be a thriving, successful stockbroker, until traumatic brain injury from a 1999 soccer accident led to seizures and sidelined his ability to talk to people and stay on task.
At 42, two realizations have turned his life around. First, he realized that brain injuries were behind the troubles he had experienced all his life. Second, he read about brain plasticity - the concept that the brain can heal and learn at all ages.
"It was a relief," says Hayner, who credits his 2008 training at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas in Dallas for helping to restore abilities he had thought were long gone. "It helped me regain my self-esteem and self-confidence. It gave me hope."
Neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to adapt and change through life, is gaining traction in medical circles.
Dr. Norman Doidge, author of the best-seller "The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science" (Penguin, $16), refers to neuroplasticity as "the most important change in our understanding of the brain in four hundred years."
"For the longest time, our best and brightest neuroscientists thought of the brain as like a machine, with parts, each performing a single mental function in a single location," he wrote in an e-mail from the University of Toronto (he also teaches at Columbia University in New York City). "We thought its circuits were genetically hardwired, and formed and finalized in childhood."
This meant that doctors assumed they could do little to help those with mental limitations or brain damage, Doidge says - because machines don't grow new parts. The new thinking changes that: "It means that many disorders that we thought can't be treated have to be revisited."
Dr. Jeremy Denning, a neurosurgeon at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, has seen that in his own practice.
"The brain has the amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between brain cells," Denning says. "I have one patient I operated on a year ago who almost died from a hemispheric brain stroke and actually recovered from coma to hemiplegia (paralysis) to actually walking out of the hospital in four to five weeks. There are numerous studies looking at the changes that occur at the molecular level at the site of neuron connections. It is a very complex phenomenon, and we are still in the infancy of completely understanding it."
Dr. Sandra Chapman believes in lifelong plasticity. As founder of the Center for BrainHealth, she has set several studies in motion to explore how that concept can help those with brain damage and everyone else, including those with aging brains, middle-schoolers who need a brain boost and autistic children who need help rewiring the brain to improve their social cognition.
Scott Hayner is among those people who have benefited from some of these studies, although BrainHealth primarily is a research institute.
"Our brain is one of the most modifiable parts of our whole body," Chapman says.
That means that, just as physical exercise keeps the body healthy, the right kind of learning will make it more likely for our brains to keep up with our expanding life span.
Even while using the latest high-tech scanning devices to monitor results in her studies, when it comes to brain health, Chapman puts her greatest emphasis on a brain-fitness exam she refers to as a "neck-up checkup." It's done one-on-one with an interviewer using puzzles, paper, pen, pencil and just a few computer questions.
A "brain physical" at the center costs $600. Based on the results, experts recommend a simple strategy usually focusing on three key areas:
• Strategic attention: the skill to block out distractions and focus on what's important. Exercises might include taking stock of your environment, identifying what distracts you and eliminating or limiting those things, and creating daily priority lists.
• Integrated reasoning: the ability to find the message or theme in what you're watching, reading or doing. Exercises might include making a point of reflecting on the meaning of a book after you've read it or a movie after you've seen it.
• Innovation: the vision to identify patterns and come up with new ideas, fresh perspectives and multiple solutions to problems. Exercises might include thinking of multiple solutions to problems as they come up, talking to other people to get a different perspective and taking time to step away from a problem to give yourself an opportunity for creative thoughts.
Hayner says his sessions - he attended for two months and completed take-home exercises - proved invaluable.
"I've been on so many drugs and medications, and they got me nowhere," he says. "Adults with TBIs (traumatic brain injuries) tend to become overwhelmed, and when someone becomes overwhelmed, it spirals into fear and chaos, and we have a tendency to shut down.
"Today, as long as I stick to what I was taught here about filtering information and innovative thinking and what's important and what's not important, and apply that to my real life, things don't confuse and baffle me. ... I can make a decision on the important things that have to be done each day."
Chapman maintains that it's never too late - or early - to learn, but she notes that some physiological changes in the brain come with age.
The frontal lobes, which control critical thinking, judgment, reasoning and problem-solving, accelerate from ages 16 to 25 and may begin to decline after age 30, particularly without efforts to keep the brain fit.
Memory and processing abilities also may slow as people get older, Chapman says.
But the brain, like the body, can stay fit in core areas as the years go by, she maintains.
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