I feel you. I'm deeply interested in the same subject. My faith won't let me believe in the notion of being lost forever.

There has been some interesting research done over the past decade or so about wiring new pathways through piggybacking on primal pathways that exist already. We do this when we use metaphors. So my young child may not understand calculus, but I can use metaphors of motion and cars and airplanes to explain the concepts to him. Over time, he uses his primal experience of motion to learn something abstract to him like calculus and eventually create a neural structure specific to calculus as his experiential database grows through the application of motion. That may not make sense, but you're someone who I think will get what a non-neuroscoence expert is struggling to convey.

I think we could maybe do something like that with some of these harder to reach disorders, but I'm not sure it has ever been applied in that way. Stop trying to reprogram what we percieve to be missing and instead layer it into pathways that are in the root of all and build from there one experience at a time???