Redesign My Brain | Season 2 | Episode 2

57m 33s

Modern living revolves around sight and sound but it dulls our senses. To help him sharpen them back up, Todd is once again putting his head in the hands of Prof. Michael Merzenich, the world-renowned neuroscientist and a pioneer of brain plasticity. First, Todd works on his Sight, with plasticity training and exercises to develop his visual working memory. But his visual processing speed and visual spatial attention need improvement, so he enlists the help of William Henzell, three-time Olympian and Australia’s top ranked table tennis player. Henzell shares with him the secret to developing exceptional visual abilities, increasing Sampson’s visual acuity score from 68% to 92%. Next, Todd’s on a quest to sharpen his hearing. Modern exposure to loud noise is dramatically increasing people’s hearing loss, but of all the senses, hearing is the most improvable. He heads to the Anechoic Chamber at Macquarie University’s National Acoustics Lab where Professor Harvey Dillon trains him to overcome the ‘Cafeteria Effect’ – an inability to hear in noisy environments – improving his results from 48% to 78%. Finally, Todd needs to improve his sense of Touch and neuroscientist Dr David Blake at Georgia Regents University Medical College is his man. Dr Blake’s sensory training techniques - blindfolded fruit identification and walking barefoot on uneven surfaces - improves Sampson’s hand-touch sensitivity by 20% and his foot-touch perception by a massive 250%. Now for cracking that safe! Todd’s anonymous mentor and master safecracker ‘Mr Black’ teaches Sampson what he knows. With only 6 weeks of training, Todd attempts to crack a 3-wheel safe with a million different combinations in just under an hour – in front of an audience in a noisy room. Has Todd sharpened his senses enough to achieve the near impossible?