Neuroplasticity for Dummies

Here's the update re: my latest D.I.Y. cognitive therapy experiment at Harvard on 24 September.
The challenge? To distill images and anecdotes of my Stroke rehabilitation for a 5minute TED-styled session at Harvard class of 1981's 30th reunion. In terms of degree of difficulty, this forum presented a great cognitive/speech therapy opportunity!
After circulating multiple drafts to the moderator and classmate Lance Miller, I had narrowed an original deck of 20 slides down to 7.

Over the first two weeks of September, I worked daily- not only on slide content but also on refining and rehearsing comments within the speaker's notes section of each slide. To lend focus to a topic as esoteric as Neuroplasticity and to evoke themes appropriate to the occasion of a 30th College reunion, I selected anecdotes that not only explained my gradual awareness of Neuroplastcity but anecdotes that roughly paralleled phases of my collegiate experience E.G. a sophomore slump, some dysfunctional focus on running at the expense of pursuits of the cognitive realm. I also sprinkled references to Heroic Epics that would be familiar to many classmates (two course quite popular in the early '80's at Harvard were Al Lord's Humanities 9 course re Early and Oral Epics, and a course affectionately known as "Heroes for Zeroes." )

Rehearsal of the near final version of a presentation to sister Sheila clocked @ 8minutes. When the session moderator reviewed my near-final effort and my promise to shave more content, he advised me to stick with the version- even if it would take 8 minutes to deliver (as he had budgeted some of the extra time into the schedule.)

Given the occasion of a 30th reunion, and some latitude with time, I opted to retain concluding with a reference to a metaphor in Tennyson's Ulysses to explain how I continue to find both parallel and more critically - motivation - for these late stages of my rehabilitation in Tennyson's metaphor of an Arch with fading margins:
"Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use."

Confiding that a primary motivation to participate in this very forum was in essence an opportunity of forced use (an integral lever of neuroplasticity), I gathered for what really did feel like a sprint to a finish line by explaining that not unlike 30 years ago when as a Senior at Harvard I was injured yet chasing the elusive 4 minute mile; this day, to keep my brain's fire burning "not to rust unburnished but to shine in use." I was sprinting to chase an (equally elusive?) 5 minute cognitive mile!

The experience of executing this presentation in a crowded amphitheater and the feedback were simply overwhelming- quite frankly had it not been for a timely congratulatory hug from classmate and event facilitator Kate I might not have held together. Ironically, one of several congratulatory notes captured this very aspect of the experience:

"Kate worries that her having impulsively hugged you afterward might have obscured your view of your standing ovation. You're the only speaker who got one of those, and it was a credit to the power of your presentation. We both hope that you got a glimpse of THAT."

Oh, I got THAT alright!
Here's a link to a PDF file of slides and my speaker's notes as well.