When I visit Posit Science’s headquarters, which occupies most of two floors in a high-rise in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, the inventor in chief is in typical form. Roving through the company’s computer-filled incubator, he spurs along a small group of twenty- and thirty-something engineers. He had put them to work on a program called Hawkeye, a series of exercises designed to pump up visual-processing capacity, much as the Brain Fitness Program works on the auditory system. “I want this accelerated,” he tells them. “Getting it to a commercial form is not that far away.”
During his career Merzenich has explored one of the most stunning propositions of our time: We create ourselves, from the inside out, each day of our lives
The work ethic comes naturally to Merzenich, the third of six children of a foreman at a lumber mill in the small town of Lebanon, Oregon. His grandfather immigrated to America from a hilly region near Cologne, Germany. As Merzenich recalls in his self-published memoir, A Childhood in the Sticks, his parents raised their children with the expectation that they would all do something for the greater good. In high school, Merzenich was a voracious reader and the kind of tinkerer who built his own radio. He was also an energetic social networker: president of the science club and leader of the concert and dance bands. “I was a nerd for sure, but was successful at it and had good nerd connections,” he writes.
Merzenich has long been as interested in engineering and the physical sciences as he is in basic biology and neuroscience. As an undergrad at the University of Portland, he impressed John Brookhart, the distinguished neuroscientist who would become one of his first mentors, with his efforts to record the electrical output of the nervous system of an insect. But it was Merzenich’s groundbreaking experiments with owl monkeys, in the 1980s and 1990s, that cemented his reputation in the emerging field of plasticity. In a series of studies, he and his collaborators demonstrated dramatic changes in the adult monkeys’ somatosensory cortex (the part of the brain that responds to sensory information) as a product of varying kinds of input. In one famous experiment, researchers severed a nerve responsible for bringing information from a part of the hand to a specific area of the cortex. They found that once that nerve’s input stopped, that same patch of real estate in the brain somehow began responding to other parts of the hand.
Yet while Merzenich continued this basic research, his own career was reorganized by his decision, made several years earlier, to collaborate on the development of one of the world’s first cochlear implants—a medical device that has helped thousands of deaf people hear. Rather than amplifying sound as a hearing aid does, a cochlear implant electrically stimulates the auditory nerve, sending signals to the brain, which recognizes those artificial signals as sound. This alternate way of hearing takes time to learn, but eventually the brain is able to interpret this totally novel type of signal. For Merzenich, watching his patients adjust amounted to yet another impressive demonstration of plasticity, this time in humans.
The neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, Merzenich’s grad school mentor at Johns Hopkins University, warned him not to join the world of business. Yet Merzenich’s experience convinced him of the power of commerce to speed the availability of scientifically inspired products that can reduce human suffering. Conveniently for him and for UCSF, an amendment to U.S. patent law called the Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, allows universities to license inventions without jeopardizing their federal research grants.
Merzenich proceeded to craft a career that has kept him exploring, and exploiting, the potential of one of the most stunning propositions of our time: We create ourselves, from the inside out, each day of our lives. The idea has echoes in existentialism, with its emphasis on freedom and responsibility, and in Buddhism, which teaches that willed attention can improve concentration and general mental health. But for Merzenich it is a rigorous piece of scientific insight.
One of the newest and most surprising investigations at Posit Science involves treating people suffering from schizophrenia with exercises similar to those already in use for learning-disabled children and the elderly. Merzenich is developing a 120-hour regimen that starts with the same training of the auditory system used in the Brain Fitness Program, adds the Hawkeye visual-processing component, and ramps up to more complex tests of information processing in a segment christened Aristotle.
Merzenich’s work with schizophrenia may at first seem like a surprising detour. It is one thing to imagine that repetitive computer exercise might help restore brain “muscles” that have atrophied with age; it is something else entirely to speculate that such training could help people suffering delusions and hallucinations. Yet even though schizophrenia is popularly seen largely as an emotional illness, it is primarily about disordered thought. Merzenich says he was thinking about treating schizophrenia with cognitive training years before he came up with the Brain Fitness Program.
