How Cognitive Training Helps Rebuild the Brain
An astonishing medical recovery puzzles scientists and gives optimism to traumatic brain injury patients. 1
Had Simon Lewis returned to his bungalow to get a different coat, or had they never taken the detour to look at a house, the accident would never have happened. He would think about this for the rest of his life.
As it is, on an early Los Angeles evening, Simon and his wife Marcy are heading west on Beverly Boulevard in a brand-new Infiniti that Simon had just purchased. Maple trees line the immaculate street, and the setting sun flickers light between the trees. Marcy suggests they look at her boss’s newly renovated house since they are near, so they start a detour.
Suddenly, a white van traveling seventy-five miles an hour rips through the stop sign on Beverly. It blindsides Lewis’s car, slamming it into the curb, where it becomes airborne and nearly split in half by a maple tree at the corner of Beverly and McCadden Place.
Coma
Simon sustained a broken skull, jaw, arms, clavicle, and pelvis, with compound fractures in nine ribs. Yet the injury that would change his life was a catastrophic brain injury.
Lewis went into a coma the night of the accident. On the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), which runs from three to 15, he scored a GCS3, meaning no motor response, no verbal response, and no visual response. It was as close to death as one can get. Studies suggest that patients with GCS3–5 have less than a 10 percent chance of living a normal life, particularly if they fail to respond within fourteen days of the injury. Lewis remained in a coma for 31 days.
As horrific as Lewis’s accident was (it killed his wife, Marcy), his incredible recovery and tireless work for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) research have helped broaden TBI awareness.
With TED Talks and his book, Rise and Shine, Lewis helps give hope to victims of traumatic brain injury, and his story demonstrates the brain’s incredible ability to regenerate itself. Yet it also highlights a growing trend in brain science: cognitive training. “What my experience demonstrates is how much we can train the brain measurably and repeatedly,” Lewis told the Sydney Morning Herald. “And that applies to everyone. We need to start screening children at school who are falling behind, and treat their difficulties, rather than writing them off. Some techniques rebuild the processes of your mind.”
The odds of surviving a coma are notoriously hard to predict, with brain injury being the most complex affliction for the most complicated organ in the body. Yet, cognitive training helped Lewis become a functional TBI survivor.
Cognitive Training
Cognitive training is not a new concept, but one that emerged in the 1940s to treat brain-injured soldiers as they prepared to return home. The global cognitive assessment and training market was valued at $6.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $34.1 billion by 2034, driven largely by demand for brain training across all age groups. With proven functionality in an older population and children, the market has exploded with phone apps, online platforms, and brain-training groups.
While these companies often make generous assertions about what their products do for the brain, scientists are ambivalent. Only some of the research demonstrates that brain training works in non-TBI people.
A study published in 2010 monitored more than 11,000 adults who performed exercises designed to improve attention, reasoning, memory, and visual-spatial skills, and it concluded that they improved at accomplishing the tasks themselves, but those skills sometimes did not transfer to life improvements, a finding more recent research continues to confirm.3 Some scientists believe intensive brain exercise can exhaust people and be counterproductive instead of beneficial—but that belief is changing.
Neuroplasticity
Part of Lewis’s injury was a “catastrophic brain insult,” in which a stroke obliterated a third of his right hemisphere and induced a brainstem contusion with severe internal bleeding.
Neuroscientists used to assume each part of the brain had a set, inflexible role, and if certain areas were injured, there was nothing to be done other than live your life with the deficits. With the science of neuroplasticity, or changing the way the brain functions, they have realized that the brain is more pliable than previously thought. Cognitive training can modify brain regions to handle tasks of damaged areas.
Cognitive training like the kind Lewis received and continues to do, has proven results in TBI patients who emerged from comas. Still, extended coma duration correlates with a reduced probability of full brain function restoration. In Lewis’s case, it took many medical professionals to rebuild his mind, and he attributes much of his recovery not to a world-class brain expert, but to Dr. Lois Provda, an educational therapist in West Hollywood.
When referred to her in October 1995, his IQ was 89, just a point below normal (between 90–110) on the Revised Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-R). Provda treated him three times a week, and by February 1997, Lewis had an IQ of more than 151, a score considered genius.2
“She had me working with Kapla building blocks, and memorizing numbers backwards and forwards,” says Lewis. “I had to put cartoon images in sequence, to help me with cause and effect, the idea that one event leads to another. Another exercise was called Interactive Metronome, where I’d have to write things with a metronome clicking out a beat. It was exhausting!”
Today, most of Lewis’s medical staff consider his brain to be, if anything, overactive. Alert and infectiously cheerful, he’s morphed into a curious academic, sling-shotting from task to task with pure enthusiasm. As a Cambridge law graduate, he historically displayed vast intelligence, yet the unique way his brain remodeled itself after the accident shocked everyone.
Recovery Isn’t Just Neuronal
For recoveries in TBI like Lewis’s, it’s a patient’s attitude and support system that distinguish how well that recovery goes, says Jeffrey Kreutzer, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Patients who stay at home and say, ‘I don’t need advice, I’ll figure it out myself, leave me alone’ — they do poorly. But someone who seeks out social relationships and volunteer work does much better. Recovery isn’t just neuronal — it’s a process that involves family support, as well as a positive attitude.”
Simon Lewis is an inspiring example of this attitude, although he is still receiving treatment decades after the accident. With his limited cognitive abilities, he experiences significant disabilities. He wears special prism glasses to drive. He can think about lifting his left foot, yet it does not move. To walk, he uses a revolutionary device that stimulates the foot muscles. Without it, he cannot walk. He still has residual pain from his reconstructed pelvis and vision issues in both eyes. “My memories used to be like a photo album. You could flick the pages and go back in time. But now, the album’s gone, all I’ve got are the photos, and I can’t tell what order they came in,” he says.
Yet his memory — and his brain — are vivid and intact. He recalls the accident and the emotions that come with it as though it were yesterday, and that inspires him to spread TBI awareness. And it reminds us that cognitive training might just change brain science.
Sources
1 Colin, Chris. “The Hollywood Producer Who Survived Catastrophe.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 29 Aug. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/the-hollywood-producer-who-survived-catastrophe/244142/.
2 Lewis, Simon. Rise and Shine: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Journey from Near Death to Full Recovery. Santa Monica Press, 2010.
3 Gobet, Fernand, and Giovanni Sala. “Cognitive Training: A Field in Search of a Phenomenon.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 1, 2023, doi:10.1177/17456916221091830.
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