Not a textbook case
Paul Bach-y-Rita: Testing the limits of neuroplasticity
This week, in honor of Brain Awareness Week, Neurocracy will profile trailblazing and influential scientists in neuroscience history.
“Just give the brain information and it will figure it out.”
Born in New York in 1934, Paul Bach-y-Rita graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at 15 and Mexico City College at 17. He received his Doctorate of Medicine from National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1959. After working briefly as a physician in Mexico, he moved to San Francisco to work for Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Sciences. That same year his father suffered a major stroke. After witnessing his father’s remarkable recovery, aided by Paul’s brother, Bach-y-Rita decided to complete a residency in rehabilitation medicine at the Stanford Santa Clara Medical School, a shift in interest that would set him on a path towards his groundbreaking research in neuroplasticity.
In the mid-20th century, the idea that the adult brain was plastic, or able to change in response to experience, was largely rejected by the neuroscience field. Bach-y-Rita’s rehabilitation work with stroke patients and individuals with vision loss led him to believe otherwise. In the late 1960s, he proposed that patients with neurological disorders and disabilities that result in sensory deficits could be treated with sensory substitution. Sensory substitution involves a sensor (e.g. motion detector), a stimulator (e.g. an electrode pad), and a system to interpret and transmit stimuli from the sensor to the stimulator. Bach-y-Rita developed a chair based on the principles of sensory substitution that allowed blind people to ‘see’. The successful implementation of the chair, a tactile vision substitution system, to treat blindness was the first experimental evidence for neuroplasticity.
Later in his research career, Bach-y-Rita was recruited as a Chair of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While at UW-Madison, he created a device to aid patients with balance disorders resulting from damage to the inner ear. The Brainport used an electric stimulator, attached to the tongue, that reacts to motion stimuli from a sensor on the patient’s body. The tool allowed patients to regain their balance and after training for several weeks, the device was no longer needed, indicating that the brain can adapt to repeated stimuli. The Brainport demonstrated that harnessing the neuroplastic nature of the brain can be an effective treatment for neurological disorders.
“Paul was nothing short of amazing in his panorama of scientific interest, and his vision of science. He was far ahead of his time.” —Dr. Arthur Janpolsky, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
In 1998, Bach-y-Rita founded a biotech company devoted to research and development of sensory substitution applications like the Brainport. The Wicab Corporation was named after the family of his wife Esther, with whom he had two daughters. Paul Bach-y-Rita died from lung cancer in 2006. He is remembered for his adventurous nature and passionate pursuit of knowledge, whether he was hitchhiking from Mexico City to New York, taking time off from medical school to train as a masseur and work as a salmon and shrimp fisherman, or working as the only physician in the Mexican village of Tilzapotla and creating tools that reshaped the field of neuroplasticity and changed the lives of his patients.
—A.I.
