Neuroplasticity Created Rain Man

NEUROPLASTICITY 

CREATED RAIN MAN

I have increased knowledge after a brain injury, when many do not. This happened due to the rewiring process. The following is an excerpt of a conversation on a social network. I worked with this person. I used to advocate for individuals with disabilities in a former job position. The kind of knowledge needed for that was quite extensive.The quote shows just how far this knowledge goes now.

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Angela Ronson
Long time no hear from. Anyway, remember how I had all that disability law knowledge? http://thoughtfulveg.blogspot.com/2012/03/vegetable-not.html (Obviously I still have all my faculties.)

Hi Angela! Yes I remember. And I think your knowledge regarding disability rights has increased since then. I've been reading your blog and posts. I'm in absolute awe of you! And I'm fascinated by your journey. There is so much we don't know about the brain and neuroplasticity. Your continued recovery is a good example of that. You my dear need to write a book.

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Back in my 1st yr of Psychology I remembered something about multiple copies of a memory are made and are stored in various places of the brain. We don't use all these copies, hence a lot of information is forgotten...but it is still there. (Remember that grade school teacher who said "Apply yourself"?) Now in neuroplasticity the brain will rewire. Since I lost the original wiring to a memory, my brain rewired to a copy. There were many copies, though, so my brain just rewired to all of them (at least most). This would explain my increased knowledge. I didn't learn anything new. It was always there. (I'm finally applying myself.) This also explains a great deal of music, movies, and TV programs being mixed in. There was a great deal of this in my childhood, therefore a great deal of multiple memory copies. (Let the TV be the babysitter.) Neuroplasticity also rewired to these. I really don't have "increased knowledge", rather an increased use of knowledge.

Also, since the rewiring happened directly, something unusual occurs: "...allowed Peek’s neurons to make new and unusual connections between his right and left hemispheres." This is about Kim Peek http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-did-the-absence-of-the-corpus&WT.mc_id=SA_Twitter_sciammind  Peek had no corpus callosum. Memories were directly wired. This explains why I  have some of his qualities. I discussed this issue and didn't know why I was so much like him. (note: I don't remember as many facts, because I never learned them.)

1/1/2013

The multiple copies theory of memory is widely used today:  http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-redundancy-in-human-memory

10/18/2015
updated