Lessons from a lady who couldn’t tell the time at age 20.
. “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal
If you were to come across a 20year old who couldn’t read the face of a clock, to tell the time, you would probably advise such a person to “Ti ese ile bo” as the Yorubas would say. It is no longer news that we all have areas deficit in our brain this reflects in the way we function. A group of people regard Mathematics as impossible, others may find it difficult to grasp abstract concepts in physics or chemistry, some say, we can’t grasp things as fast as we want, for some it could be lack of concentration coupled with weak memory and the list goes on.
The widely held belief that the brain is an unalterable hardware, such that if you were born with a particular brain deficit you are most likely going to live with it till you die is a gross fallacy. Current research in the field of neuroscience has revealed that the human brain is capable of massively restructuring itself, given the right kind of input. Evidence shows that there are about 100billion neurons in your brain, comprising both left and right hemispheres. It goes further to say that if for whatever reason you lose a hemisphere, your brain is so resilient that it can employ one hemisphere to do the job. This goes a long way in showing how indescribably sophisticated your brain is. Having brain deficits isn’t our fault some of us were just born like that. Unfortunately this was the fate suffered by the young, beautiful lady who couldn’t tell time at age 20 Miss Barbara Arrowsmith Young. She was born with apparent learning disabilities; she had the very debilitating problem of not being able to understand things. She couldn’t distinguish between the words “saw” and “was”. The words “father’s brother” and “brother’s father” meant the same to her, she could understand that an elephant is big and that a fly is small but she couldn’t understand...