THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF --- STORIES OF PERSONAL TRIUMPH
FROM THE FRONTIERS OF BRAIN SCIENCE
by Norman Doidge. Viking, 2007
NOTE TO THE READER (pxi)
PREFACE (pxiii-xvi)
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 previously unknown ability to change...For four hundred years this venture would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed. The commonsense wisdom for hundreds of years was that after childhood the brain cells failed to develop properly, or were injured, or died, they could not be replaced...Since the brain could not change, human nature, which emerges from it, seemed necessarily fixed and unalterable as well.
The belief that the brain could not change had three major sources:
(1) the fact that brain-damaged patients could so rearely make full recoveries;
(2) our inability to observe the "living brain's" microscope activities;
(3) the idea, which dated back to the beginnings of modern science, that the brain is like a glorious "machine." (While machines do many extraordinary things --- they don't change and grow!)
When counseling clients did not progress psychologically as much as hoped, often the conventional medical wisdom was that their problems were deeply "hardwired" into an unchangeable brain. ("Hardwiring" was another machine metaphor coming from the idea of the brain as computer hardware, with permanently connected circuits, each designed to perform a specific, unchangeable function.)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a band of briliant scientists, at the frontiers of brain science, made a series of unexpected discoveries. They showed that the brian changed its very structure with each different activity it performed. It perfected its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. When certain "brain parts" failed, then other parts could sometimes take over. (The "machine" metaphor, of the brain as an organ with specialized parts, could not fully account for changes the brain scientists were seeing. They began to call this fundamental brain property "neuroplasticity."
"Neuro" if for neurons, which are the the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. "Plastic" means changeable, malleable, or modifiable. At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications because their colleagues belittled them for promoting what they thought was a fanciful notion. Yet the brain researchers persisted and slowly overtunred the doctrine of the "unchanging brain."
One of the brain scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn your genes on or off. In other words, you can shape your brain anatomy and your behavior, which is surely one of teh most extraordinary discoveries of the 20th century. This idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is the most important alteration in understanding how brains work since the basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron. Like all revolutions, this neuroplastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addictions, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains.
All of these disciplines of study will have to come to terms with the fact of the "self-changing brain" and with the realization that the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes the course of our individual lives. Neuroplasticity has the power to produce more flexible but also more rigid behaviors --- a phenomenon called the "plastic paradox." It has the power to render our brains not only more resourceful but also more vulnerable to outside influences. Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our brain's plasticity. Once a particular change occurs in the neurons of the brain and becomes well established, it can prevent other changes from occurring.
By understanding both the positive and negative effects of neuroplasticity, you can truly understand the extent of human possibilities!
1) A woman perpetually falling --- (p1-26)
Rescued by the man who discovered the plasticity of our senses
2) Building herself a better brain --- (p27-44)
A woman labeled "retarded" discovers how to heal herself
3) Redesigning the brain --- (p45-92)
A scientist changes brains to sharpen perception and memory, increase speed of thought, and heal learning problems
4) Acquiring tastes and loves --- (p93-131)
What neuroplasticity teaches us about sexual attraction and love
5) Midnight resurrections --- (p132-163)
Stroke victims learn to move and speak again
6) Brain lock unlocked --- (p164-176)
Using plasticity to stop worries, obsessions, compulsions, and bad habits
7) Pain --- (p177-195)
The dark side of plasticity
8) Imagination --- (p196-214)
How thinking makes it so
9) Turning our ghosts into ancestors --- (p215-244)
Psychoanalysis as a neuroplastic therapy
10) Rejuvenation --- (p245-257)
The discovery of the neuronal stem cell and lessons for preserving our brains
11) More than the sum of her parts --- (p258-286)
A woman shows us how radically plastic the brain can be
APPENDIX 1 --- The culturally modified brain (p287-312)
APPENDIX 2 --- Plasticity and the idea of progress (p313-318)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (p319-322)
NOTES AND REFERENCES (p323-408)
INDEX (p409-427)
Return to intro essay #1: Focus on the Self-Liberation Philosophy and Strategy
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