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 Book review - The Brain that Changes Itself
Neuroplasticity is a scientific concept which challenges the ‘mechanistic’ view that the brain’s structure is fixed – a view which replaced more mystical notions about the soul and the body, and has guided neuroscience since the seventeenth century. Doidge’s research was spurred on by his observation that when patients 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 being another metaphore which identifies the brain with a machine. In the book Doidge takes you on a journey to meet medical practitioners, scientists, carers and patients who have been able to heal serious psychological and physical medical conditions employing unconventional techniques which support this ‘plastic’ view of the brain. He introduces you to: a scientist who employs new techniques to enable a person blind since birth to begin to see; stroke victims (of several decades) declared incurable who were helped to recover; people whose learning disorders were cured; and others who ‘rewired their brains with their thoughts’ to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. The book also provides a wealth of information and insight into the relationship between our minds, bodies and experience. It includes a fascinating discussion of the work of Paul Bach-y-Rita who says that ‘We see with our brains, not with our eyes’, challenging common-sense views of perceptual processes. It also provides evidence supporting Freud’s view that formative developmental periods in early childhood have life-long impact. It introduces the concept of competitive ‘brain maps’ which helps to explain why ‘unlearning’ a ‘bad’ habit is often a lot harder than learning a ‘good’ one in the first place. It also suggests that human libido, even sexual preference is ‘curiously fickle, easily altered by our psychology’. Perhaps most heartening (particularly for meditators) is Michael Merzenich’s research which suggests that we can keep our minds vital right through old age, so long as we regularly learn something truly new to us, and do so with the same intense focus we had when we learnt things as children. Related pages
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meditation courses
In this easy-to-read, inspiring and moving book, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge provides striking evidence of the mind’s ability to change its own structure and function; that is, evidence supporting the ‘neuroplasticity’ of the mind.
