Merzenich first realized how malleable the brain is in a series of experiments in the mid-1980s.
But for sufferers, that should not obscure the basic promise of the Tallal-Merzenich approach.
Merzenich, whose brain has been in use for 63 years, has wisely put his research work on sale.
In listening and speaking, Dr Tallal and Dr Merzenich argue, dyslexics learn to compensate for their hearing problem.
For Merzenich, improving memory and cognition among older people is just the beginning.
Merzenich claims his software enables the brain, according to cognitive testing, to perform as if it were ten years younger.
But despite the elegance of the Tallal-Merzenich argument, and the encouraging results from their game, their work is still extremely controversial.
Merzenich built on that work to develop, with colleagues from UCSF, one of the first practical cochlear implants for the hearing-impaired, in the late 1980s.
Brain plasticity, the field that Merzenich helped pioneer, is now one of the hottest areas in medicine, one with hugely positive implications for an aging society.
Michael Merzenich, a UC, San Francisco professor, has developed computer games that might help Alzheimer's patients improve brain function (" Sharp As A Tack" ).
Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco, has spent nearly his entire 35-year career divining the intricate electrophysiology of the brain.
So Dr Tallal and Dr Merzenich have founded a company, Scientific Learning, to sell a computer game intended to improve the hearing of children with language problems.
Merzenich envisions a day when everyone over 40 will take a brain fitness course that will enable his brain to retain information as well as it did when he was 20.
Dr Studdert-Kennedy and his allies reckon that although Fast ForWord does appear to improve language competence, it may not be for the reasons that Dr Tallal and Dr Merzenich have claimed.
During that time, says Merzenich, as the patients listen to and repeat words they hear, their brains create new activity patterns to represent pieces of meaningful speech, thus teaching themselves to hear again.
Now, Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues have tested this idea by giving extensive hearing tests to grown-ups with a wide range of reading abilities.
Dr Studdert-Kennedy maintains that speech moves in a fluid stream of sound that has little resemblance to the discrete tones used in Dr Merzenich's hearing tests, and that dyslexia probably stems from a high-level problem in the brain's language system that is simply not yet understood.
Michael Studdert-Kennedy, a psychologist at the Haskins Laboratory, in New Haven, Connecticut, and one of the most vigorous critics of the approach, argues that other studies have shown that the brain processes speech sounds completely differently from non-speech sounds, and that the hearing problem identified by Dr Merzenich's group thus has nothing to do with dyslexia.
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