When calamity strikes the human brain, it does so without warning. A stroke is sudden — a blow from within. One moment, a person is whole; in the next, a blood clot or hemorrhage starves brain tissue of oxygen, and entire parts of the self vanish. Memories, words, gestures, the ability to smile, walk, or even feed oneself can be lost in an instant. Survivors often find themselves shadows of who they once were, locked in uncooperative bodies and dependent on others for even the smallest tasks.
Stroke remains one of the leading causes of adult disability. While most common in the elderly, it does not discriminate by age — even people in their forties or younger can fall victim. Emergency medicine can sometimes limit the damage by unblocking a clot or controlling a bleed, but once brain cells die, there is no way to resurrect them. Modern medicine can preserve life, but it often cannot restore it.
And yet, the story doesn’t always end in despair.
The Hidden Power of Reflexes
The brain may falter, but the body holds its own wisdom. Consider the simplest spinal reflex — the knee-jerk. When tapped, sensory receptors send a message not to the brain, but to the spinal cord, which instantly signals the leg muscles to contract. We don’t think; the body simply acts. Walking works the same way — movement in one leg automatically triggers the other to follow.
This built-in resilience inspired neurologists like Edward Taub to push the boundaries of stroke recovery.
Taub Therapy: Rebuilding the Broken
Conventional rehabilitation after stroke often feels gently paced: a few sessions a week, an hour at a time. Taub’s approach, in contrast, is relentless, almost militant. His patients train six hours a day, ten to fifteen days in a row. The intensity, exhausting as it is, forces the brain to rewire. Tasks are repeated again and again — ten, twenty, a hundred times — until dormant connections spark to life.
At first, progress comes quickly; later, more gradually. Yet the results can be astonishing. Early on, Taub worked primarily with patients who still had some movement in their limbs. Today, his clinic has shown that even those with completely paralyzed hands can regain surprising abilities. Studies have demonstrated that eight out of ten stroke survivors who had lost arm function substantially improved with his method — even many years after their original stroke.
For some, the therapy feels like unlocking a long-closed room in the house of the self. What was once thought gone forever reenters daily life: the ability to button a shirt, smooth a child’s hair, hold a pen. The lost shadows return, flickering with life again.
The Mind’s Other Prison: OCD
If stroke is the body betraying the brain, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is the brain betraying the mind. Unlike stroke, its damage is invisible — but no less devastating.
OCD often begins with an emotional spark. An anniversary of a loved one’s death, a story about illness, a fleeting ache in the body — where most of us shrug off such moments, an obsessive mind latches on. A whisper of fear becomes an iron chorus: What if I’m dying? What if I hurt someone? What if I didn’t lock the door?
We all visit these anxious thoughts briefly. But for someone with OCD, they circle endlessly. Doubt becomes a drumbeat, and relief never lasts long. Some obsessives will check a stove a hundred times yet never believe it’s off. Others wash their hands until the skin cracks, or drive in circles to be sure they haven’t run someone over.
It isn’t superstition — it’s torment. To live with OCD often means existing on “mental death row,” convinced catastrophe is around the corner. Even reassurance from a doctor or loved one can dissolve in minutes, replaced with more doubt. What makes OCD cruel is not simply the fear of mistakes made in the past, but the dread of mistakes that could happen, mistakes imagined into inevitability.
Stroke, OCD, and the Shared Fragility of Being Human
At first glance, stroke and OCD appear worlds apart — one rooted in blood vessels and brain tissue, the other in thought loops and compulsions. Yet they mirror each other in profound ways. Stroke traps the body while leaving the mind often intact; OCD traps the mind while the body remains free. In both, human potential is caged — and in both, the possibility of recovery lies in repetition, patience, and the stubborn hope that the brain can be coaxed into freer patterns.
Perhaps this is what makes both stories — of stroke survivors regaining movement, and OCD patients learning to resist compulsions — profoundly human. We are creatures of fragility, easily undone, yet also of resilience, capable of rewiring not just our brain pathways but our futures.
Closing Thought
A strike from within, whether clot, bleed, or thought-loop, can make life feel derailed. But the history of recovery — from Taub’s relentless therapies to the small victories of those with OCD — reminds us that shadows need not remain shadows forever. Healing, though rarely simple or swift, is about reclaiming agency, one repetition, one step, and one act of courage at a time.
Source : The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/570172.The_Brain_that_Changes_Itself
Read the Previous Article in the Series :
Thinking Beyond Science 
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