The Brain That Changes Itself - How the Mind Can Change the Brain
"The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science" is a book on neuroplasticity by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, M.D. In it, Dr. Doidge explains that the human brain is as malleable as a lump of wet clay, not just in childhood, but well into old age.
This has implications not just for individual patients with neurological diseases, but for all human beings, and even for human cultures. Think that the brain is hardwired and that what you have by the age of eighteen is what you're left with? Think again.
Regarding patients with brain injuries, Dr. Doidge offers the following examples of brain plasticity in his book:
- Cheryl Schiltz lost her sense of balance when her inner ear's vestibular system was damaged due to a drug's side effect. She was sentenced to a lifetime of wobbling and feeling as if she were in a constant free fall. After a year of sessions with a device that basically created an external vestibular system, her brain rewired itself and she has now regained her balance and returned to a normal life.
- Michelle Mack was born, literally, with just half of her brain. However, she walks, talks, votes, holds down a job and so on -- having transferred the tasks more generally assigned to the missing hemisphere to her remaining half-brain.
- Michael Bernstein suffered a debilitating stroke in his 50s which paralyzed the left side of his body. He's now back to his former life: through rehabilitation the functions of the brain areas killed in the stroke transferred themselves to healthy regions.
Brain plasticity also means all of the following: you can lift depression, relieve anxiety, ease pain, raise IQ, reverse senility, and change what you thought were entrenched personality characteristics. Read on below to discover more about the brain's plasticity, and how our brains change with every thought we have.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its structure and function in response to experience.
Important!
Norman Doidge, M.D.
Norman Doidge, M.D., is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher on the faculty at the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York.
Doidge is also an author, essayist, and poet.
Doidge is also an author, essayist, and poet.
Why This Book Was Written
Dr. Doidge explains in the preface of "The Brain That Changes Itself" that he became interested in the idea of a changing brain because of his work as a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. When patients did not progress psychologically as much as hoped, the conventional medical wisdom was that their problems were simply "hardwired" into an unchangeable brain.When he first began to hear that the brain was not hardwired, he decided to go out and investigate and weigh the evidence for himself. Dr. Doidge traveled across North America to meet some of the pioneering researchers who were making revolutionary discoveries about the plasticity of the brain, often going against the grain of their skeptical colleagues. In addition, he visited their patients, people who were once thought of as incurable and who are now living normal lives.
What he learned from these scientists and from their patients turned into the raw material for the book.
(Image taken from here.)
Preface
Read the book's Preface here.
The Brain That Changes Itself
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Null)
Amazon Price: $9.65 (as of 02/17/2012)
Excerpt from the preface of the book:
"This book is about the revolutionary discovery that the human brain can change itself, as told through the stories of the scientists, doctors, and patients who have together brought about these astonishing transformations. Without operations or medications, they have made use of the brain's hitherto unknown ability to change. Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged."
Implications of Thinking of the Brain as a Machine
Doidge argues that the idea that the brain is plastic--in the sense that it's changeable, adaptable, and malleable--is the most important change in our understanding of the human brain in 400 years.For 400 years the world's best scientists thought of the brain as a machine, like a computer. That is, the brain was regarded as a machine with parts, where each part performed a specific function. A machine can do many things, but it can't grow new parts, and it can't rewire itself.
The implications of thinking of the brain as a machine with fixed parts were the following:
- If anyone was born with brain deficits or limitations, they simply had to live with these limitations, in all cases.
- Those who had sustained brain trauma could do nothing about it, in all cases.
- Anyone born with a normal brain who hoped to improve their brain, or maintain it as they aged, was seen as wasting their time.
- Human nature was seen as being fixed, in so far as we saw the brain to be fixed.(Source).
photo credit: judepics 
Norman Doidge
Photo Credit
Photo taken from here.
Why Did It Take So Long to Discover the Brain's Plasticity?
If the brain is plastic, how is it possible we missed it for so long? Doidge offers the following four reasons:1. We didn't have the technology to view the brain.
2. Modern science could be said to have begun with Galileo. Based on Galileo's findings, scientists began to think of the universe as a giant cosmic clock; biologists then took this model of mechanistic understanding and applied it to the organs inside our bodies. William Harvey, who discovered that the heart circulated the blood through vessels and was essentially a pump, began mechanistic biology.
Shortly thereafter, the philosopher Rene Descartes described the nervous system very much like a pump, and that there were currents that moved up and down the nerves, which we later learned were electric currents. It soon seemed to scientists that the brain was also machine-like.
3. In those cases in which people would get better from strokes, it would be explained away: the brain wasn't damaged, it was just in shock. That is, any evidence of brain plasticity was dismissed.
4. Plasticity is the culprit that causes us to miss plasticity; plasticity gives rise to flexibility, but it also gives rise to a lot of very rigid behavior. If you're on a hill covered in snow and you create a path in the snow, the next time you're going down that way you'll have a tendency to go down the same path you created. Soon, that path becomes a rut. The brain works in much the same way, which can hamper our ability to think in different ways than we're accustomed to.
photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar More Case Histories Found In "The Brain That Changes Itself"
- A woman labeled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises and now cures those of others. (If you'd like to read more about her, this woman's name is Barbara Arrowsmith Young.)
- Blind people learning to see.
- Learning disorders cured.
- IQs raised.
- Aging brains rejuvenated.
- Children with cerebral palsy learning to move more gracefully.
- Entrenched depression and anxiety disappearing.
- Lifelong character traits altered.
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Fetching RSS feed... please stand byHow We Gain Skills
Long lasting changes as the result of skill learning takes 10 months of repeated practice.
An important example of neuroplasticity is how we gain skills. Doidge presents an experiment performed by Pascual Leone in "The Brain That Changes itself" in which Leone mapped the brains of blind people learning to read Braille.The blind subjects practiced reading Braille for two hours a day, Monday through Friday, with an extra hour of homework. Their brains were mapped each Friday after their week cram, and again on Mondays after their weekend off. What the scans ultimately showed is that the maps dramatically increased in size on Friday scans, but had returned to a "baseline" size by Monday.
After six months, however, the Monday map gradually increased, and by ten months they plateaued. The subjects then took a two month break, after which they were remapped, showing no decrease from the last mapping they had right before their two month break. What this shows is that long lasting changes as the result of skill learning took ten months of repeated practice.
photo credit: lissalou66 Important!
Dr. Doidge argues that we can change our brain structure through:
- The actions we commit ourselves to.
- Sensing and perceiving the world.
- Thinking and imagining; the power of our thoughts over our brain is gaining scientific credibility.
- The actions we commit ourselves to.
- Sensing and perceiving the world.
- Thinking and imagining; the power of our thoughts over our brain is gaining scientific credibility.
More Must-Have Brain Books on Amazon
Neuroplasticity and Meditation
- Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation
- In what follows, we summarize the changes in the brain that occur during different styles of meditation practice. Such changes include alterations in patterns of brain function assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), changes in the cortical evoked response to visual stimuli that reflect the impact of meditation on attention, and alterations in amplitude and synchrony of highfrequency oscillations that probably play an important role in connectivity among widespread circuitry in the brain.
- Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice
- Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes.
The Culturally Modified Brain
It's not just the brain creating culture, culture also rewires our brains. Our culture determines to a large extent not just how we interpret our sensory data, but the limits and capacity of the neuronal structures that process sensory data.
Our individual cultural practices and experiences actually rewire our brains, so that differences between cultures give rise to different kinds of brains in the members of those cultures.
“We can change the brain's capacity to learn. Unlike a computer, the brain constantly adapts itself.”
Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Pioneer in Brain Plasticity Research
From chapter three of "The Brain That Changes Itself".
For more than three decades, Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D.,--Professor Emeritus, University of California at San Francisco--has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. As Dr. Doidge explains in "The Brain That Changes Itself", Dr. Merzenich has made some ambitious claims for the field of neuroplasticity, such as the following:
Merzenich argues that practicing a new skill, under the right conditions, can change hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the connections between the nerve cells in our brain maps. Before Merzenich's work, the brain was seen as a complex machine, having unalterable limits on memory, processing speed, and intelligence. Merzenich has shown that each of these assumptions is wrong.
- That brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia;
- That plasticity exists from the cradle to the grave;
- That radical improvements in cognitive functioning-how we learn, think, perceive, and remember-are possible even in the elderly.
Merzenich argues that practicing a new skill, under the right conditions, can change hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the connections between the nerve cells in our brain maps. Before Merzenich's work, the brain was seen as a complex machine, having unalterable limits on memory, processing speed, and intelligence. Merzenich has shown that each of these assumptions is wrong.
Chapter Three
You can read Chapter 3 of "The Brain That Changes Itself" here.
Posit Science
Dr. Merzenich is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Posit Science, a site dedicated to brain fitness and training
More Brain Lenses
by Marelisa Fábrega
The Brain That Changes Itself Links
- The Brain That Heals Itself on CBC Documentaries
- For centuries the human brain has been thought of as incapable of fundamental change. People suffering from neurological defects, brain damage or strokes were usually written-off as hopeless cases. But recent and continuing research into the human brain is radically changing how we look at the potential for neurological recovery.
- The Brain: Malleable, Capable, Vulnerable
- New York Times review of "The Brain That Changes Itself".
"The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility. Mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff...with implications for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history." - The Brain that Changes Itself: hopeful book on the science of neuroplasticity
- Review of of "The Brain That Changes Itself" on the popular blog Boingboing.
- Interview With Dr. Doidge
- Episode 26 of the Brain Science Podcast is an interview with Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, author of The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (2007).
- The Brain That Changes Itself: Good News From the Frontiers of Brain Science
- This is an article on my blog.
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Keeah
Aug 26, 2011 @ 2:55 pm | delete
- I highly recommend this book as well. Drastically improved my understanding of the brain function and learning. I teach special needs children. Once I read "nerves that fire together wire together" I tweaked my teaching of fine motor skills i.e. pincer grasp or pencil grip. I realized it wasn't enough to remind them to hold a pencil with just the index and thumb but to keep the other fingers busy by having them hold something at the same time as the pencil.
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HomeDecoratingDiva Nov 23, 2010 @ 12:03 am | delete
- Thank you for this information!
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BigGirlBlue
Nov 16, 2010 @ 9:19 pm | delete
- This is one of my favorite books. I developed temporal lobe seizures a few years ago and this book gave me a lot of insight into my brain and reconditioning it.
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WordCustard
Nov 16, 2010 @ 3:26 am | delete
- Very thought provoking and encouraging.
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JziE
Nov 2, 2010 @ 12:05 am | delete
- nice lens on brainssss
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by Marelisa
Marelisa
Hi, I'm Marelisa Fabrega. I blog over at Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Georgetown...
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