Train Your Mind Change Your Brain: How a new science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves

by Sharon Begley

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New York: Random House 2007.   254 pp.  Notes 13 pp.  HB $24.95.

Imagine the illuminating thought that our brains are not fixed and immutable, but instead are malleable and capable of birthing new neurons even into the eighth decade of life.

Sharon Begley, a science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes about neuroscience, genetics, physics, astronomy, and anthropology.  In 2004, Begley covered a historic meeting between five scientists and the Dalai Lama on the topic of neuroplasticity at the Mind and Life Institute.  Neuroplasticity is a new science investigating whether the brain is capable of altering its structure by generating new neurons. 

Train Your Mind. Change Your Brain is about the research of these scientists and how their explorations parallel Buddhist philosophy.  In order to understand the wonders of this research this review will describe the contributions of each scientist to the field of neuroplasticity, as it was presented to the Dalai Lama.  There is a brief description of the Dalai Lama's responses comparing Buddhist philosophy with some of these discoveries. 

Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, made seminal discoveries in how environments can change brains.  Gage told the Dalai Lama that one of his most important scientific discoveries, showed that the brain was not limited to the neurons it was born with and that even older adult brains were capable of generating new neurons.  (p. 51) Gage's initial work revealed that mice placed in cages equipped with running wheels and toys showed evidence of neurogenesis, suggesting that physical activity alone could generate new brain cells, compared to the brains of mice in cages without running wheels and toys.  He told his Holiness "It doesn't matter what age they [mice] are when they begin to live in the enriched environment.   The senior-citizen mice got an even greater boost from their stimulating quarters than younger mice did." (p. 58)

Gage also discovered that any mouse exercise had to be voluntary; if forced, stress hormones inundated the brain, killing neurons.  According to Gage, "The environment and our experiences change our brain, so who you are as a person changes by virtue of the environment you live in and the experiences you have." (p. 71)

Wanting to see if neurogenesis occurred in primates, Gage started searching for human subjects.  A Swedish neurologist working in Gage's lab said that cancer patients were often injected with bromodeoxyuridine, or BrdU, because it marked newborn cells and was being used in some hospitals to show how many new malignant cancer cells were dividing and how rapidly this occurred. Gage's team reasoned that BrdU would work at tracking the birth of new neurons as well as it did tracking cancer cells, since both kinds of cells needed DNA and would reliably attach to BrdU.  Gage and his team studied the brains of five deceased cancer patients who had been injected with BrdU during their treatment.  He told the Dalai Lama:  "All of the brains showed evidence of new neurons exactly where they had found neurogenesis in other species." (p. 64)  Gage could now prove, through chemical analysis, that mature neurons were generated in patients in their fifties and seventies. 

This discovery overturned generations of conventional neuroscience that claimed the human brain was limited to the neurons with which it was born, and was the first scientific evidence for neurogenesis in the adult human brain.

Buddhism teaches that all beings should be free from suffering.  Their tradition teaches compassion and therefore experiments on animals were problematic.  The Dalai Lama said that if the knowledge gained from these experiments benefited a large community of human beings and if they were carried out with compassion and care, then the research would have some moral justification as long as care and sensitivity to even the smallest of animals was maintained.  He felt there was a great need for ethical constraints in any experiments.  He said, "So, therefore, from that viewpoint, yes, we have some justification to use another animal's life, but while we are exploiting them, it must be with some feelings, some care."  (p. 60)

Michael Meaney, from Montreal's McGill University, told the Dalai Lama that his work targeted a huge question in human development about how much of what we become reflects the genes we inherited and how much reflects the environment in which we grew up.  Meaney had documented how the behavior of attentive mother rats affected their offspring's ability to handle stress compared to the behaviors of babies born to non-attentive mothers.  He found that.experiences in early life, and the care and attention received from the mother altered their babies' reactions to stressful situations.       

The Dalai Lama agreed, saying that it was important to raise an individual in a peaceful family and community, and in order to create a peaceful world, people in the next generation must be taught how to have a peaceful mind and how to become peaceful individuals.  This is done by providing loving, compassionate and peaceful environments for children. 

Helen Neville and her colleagues from the University of Oregon, while, working with the blind and deaf, discovered that the brain, when deprived of one sense, underwent a radical reorganization in the cortex.  When the ears failed to respond to external stimulation, the auditory regions of the brain picked up signals from the retinas.  In the blind, the response to hearing occurred in their visual cortex.  By studying the blind, Neville found that cortical reorganization was the result of the lives they led, lives in which vision and hearing were absent. (p. 109)  

In parallel with Neville's findings, Thupten Jinpa, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and primary English translator for the Dalai Lama, stated "In Buddhism there is a claim that an advanced meditator can transfer sensory functions to different organs, so that visual activity can be performed by something other than the eyes and hearing by something other than the ears.  In this case, a meditator can read with closed eyes." (p. 109)

Phillip Shaver, of the University of California, is a leader in the field of attachment theory.  The focal point of attachment theory is on a child's sense of emotional security developed in the first years of life.  He discovered that a person's sense of emotional security was based on early childhood experiences.  Simply put, an avoidant mother will have an avoidant child; an anxious mother, an anxious child; a secure mother, a secure child. (p. 209)  These early experiences have a powerful effect on individuals in how they interact later in life, how they respond in close adult relationships, their feelings about different ethnic groups and their willingness to help strangers. (p. 10)  "With numerous studies showing that brain circuitry can be altered by experience, there is every reason to think that the circuitry underlying attachment can change, too." (p. 209) 

According to the Dalai Lama, when someone is faced with a threat there is a natural tendency to seek a safe haven, to seek protection with someone or something that has the capacity to protect.  In childhood it is important to grow up in a genuine atmosphere of loving-kindness.  True human affections and compassion are necessary to survival. (p. 211)    

Richard Davidson and colleagues found that the more hours someone spent practicing meditation the greater their attentional ability. (p. 224)  Whether the mind acts directly on the brain, or whether the electrical signals jumping from neuron to neuron did so, did not really matter; what mattered was that thought, meditation and other manifestations of the mind could alter the brain and was a learnable skill.  Monks wired to an electroencephalograph, while engaged in generating the compassion meditation, showed greater activity in their left prefrontal cortex, a site known to be associated with happiness as opposed to the right prefrontal cortex that is associated with unhappiness. The compassion meditation resulted in greater activation in those areas linked to love and empathy and can be generated through mental training.  (p. 238)

Buddhist philosophy teaches that a person's happiness is not fixed, and through meditation a person can increase their capacity for compassion and happiness. (p. 241) 

Being an older adult, I found these studies to be exciting and hopeful to those of us who do worry about the possible loss of our mental acuity.  Train the Mind Change Your Brain, is fascinating. Everyone will find it very readable and interesting. This book illustrates how thoughts can change the brain through focus, training and effort.  In conclusion, learning that our environment and our experiences can change our brain was probably the most freeing realization, personally, in the entire book.  There is nothing in this book that I could critique negatively. 
       
Review by Monte Mohr
Doctoral Student
Holos University Graduate Seminary
www.HolosUniversity.org

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