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In 1989, some years after abandoning the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Neil Young, in an interview with the Village Voice Rock and Roll Quarterly, talked about Ben’s treatment following Glenn Doman’s method:
You manipulate the kid through a crawling pattern … He’s crawling down the hallway, he’s banging his head trying to crawl. But he can’t crawl, and these people have told us that if he didn’t make it, it was gonna be our fault … We lasted eighteen months. Eighteen months of not going out. Eighteen months of not doing anything.
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In the last thirty years, the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, with its stupid Lamarckian belief that passive, repetitive movement can mold the characteristics of children with cerebral palsy, changing their brains, has lost almost all its followers.
It was all mashed potatoes and no T-bone steak.
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In the previous image: an egg.
Ben Young is now an egg producer. Instead of T-bone steaks, he has a farm in La Honda, with two hundred and fifty chickens.
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During the treatment using Glenn Doman’s method, Neil Young and his wife moved Ben for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. While they did this, Ben remained completely passive.
With us it was the opposite.
Tito moved freely about the large apartment in which we were staying in Rio de Janeiro, going from room to room, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. While he did this, my wife and I watched in passive amazement.
Tito was our Glenn Doman. He changed our brains.
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How did Tito move?
He had a ride-on car made by Chicco.
At first, he could only move the car backward. In time, he learned how to move the car forward and sideways, pressing down with his two feet at once.
When Tito started to pick up speed and fall over sideways, we fitted the car with two horizontal bars to give him more stability. When he started to pick up even more speed and to fall forward, performing a somersault, we came up with the idea of screwing another wheel onto the front of the car.
Tito’s falls had become as spectacular as Lou Costello’s.
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The greatest obstacle to a child with cerebral palsy is the impossibility of discovering the world around him.
With his Chicco car, Tito partially overcame that obstacle.
He would go into wardrobes and take the socks out of the drawers. He would go into the kitchen and tug at the cook’s apron. He would pass underneath the ping-pong table while we were having a game. He would go into the bathroom and drag the roll of toilet paper around the whole apartment.
Tito was discovering the world. We were discovering Tito discovering the world.
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In the previous image: Tito in his car.
The toy car was Tito’s second mode of transport.
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As time passed, Tito’s cerebral palsy became more and more obvious.
Other boys his age were running around and talking. He remained harnessed to the past, trying to crawl. His body was mutinying against his brain. His brain gave an order, his body disobeyed.
Tito was Dr. Strangelove, always trying to strangle himself.
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At seven months, Tito was simply a person we loved. At eighteen months, he had already become a person with cerebral palsy whom we loved.
We loved Tito so much that we even loved cerebral palsy.
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I quote from the column I published on 24 June 2002:
There is no more thrilling adventure than having a child with cerebral palsy. The worst enemy for a child with cerebral palsy is gravity. It’s as if he were being permanently pursued by some crazed judo player who enjoys tripping him up. What he needs most of all is to learn how to fall. Then he’ll leap from white belt to yellow belt, from yellow belt to red belt, until he reaches his limit. All the motor abilities that we acquire automatically, instinctively, he is trying to acquire through discipline, method, thought. It’s the struggle of the intellect against savage nature. The perfect metaphor for the history of humanity. David and Goliath. Theseus and the Minotaur. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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(Picture Credit 1.13)
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In the previous image: one of the sixteen falls made by Lou Costello in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
No one falls better than Lou Costello.
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I ended that column published on 24 June 2002 in shamelessly sentimental fashion. I loved Tito. I loved cerebral palsy.
When people learn that my son has cerebral palsy, they look at him with a mixture of sympathy and pity. I look at him as if he were a totem: with devotion, reverence and a feeling of inferiority. They say that a child with cerebral palsy is better suited for living on the Moon, where there’s no gravity. My son, therefore, is a man of the future, ready for interplanetary travel. You doubtless remember the Star Trek episode in which the aliens from a distant galaxy think that Captain Kirk is God? Well, I’m just like those aliens, and my son is Captain Kirk.
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Apart from saying that Tito was God, I also said that “a child with cerebral palsy is like Newton’s apple: when he falls, he reveals the world’s secret mechanisms.”
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Tito was my Law of Gravity. He was the principle by which I began to measure reality.
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In the early years of his career as a neurologist, Sigmund Freud devoted himself to the study of cerebral palsy.
In 1897, he published his main work on the subject, entitled Infantile Cerebral Paralysis.
At the time, Sigmund Freud was entirely immersed in his research into neuroses. In one of his letters, he remarked:
I am working on a study of infantile paralysis,
a subject that doesn’t interest me in the least.
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Unlike Sigmund Freud, I was entirely immersed in my research into cerebral palsy, and neuroses didn’t interest me in the least.
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In the second half of 2003, we took Tito to a neurologist in Boston.
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In the previous image: Tito in Boston.