Book (Oct 2011)

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

Norman Doidge. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York, NY: Penguin Books Ltd. 2007, p. 13-14.

I found it hard to put this book down. It contradicts much of what I learned in medical school about the brain. I was taught that nerve cells grow in childhood, but that after the teen years it is all downhill for the nervous system from there. Nerves degenerate as we age, lose much of the complexities of their interconnections with other nerve cells, and die in increasing numbers.This was the explanation we were given for loss of memory and senility in old age.

This was the explanation for why people did not recover mental and physical functions after brain damage from injuries or strokes.  
I was taught that various areas of the brain specialized in motor and sensory functions, and that if one of these areas was damaged, then that function was lost forever.

Norman Doidge has collected a marvelous mass off information on neuroplasticity which demonstrates that all of the above is wrong. He presents his data in clear, concise summaries of exciting research, followed by the stories of how pioneering researchers discovered and developed the proof that our brain continues to grow and evolve throughout our life.

Paul Bach-y-Rita
Our senses have an unexpectedly plastic nature, he discovered, and if one is damaged, another can sometimes take over for it, a process he calls “sensory substitution.” He developed ways of triggering sensory substitution and devices that give us “supersenses.” By discovering that the nervous system can adapt to seeing with cameras instead of retinas. Bach-y-Rita laid the groundwork for the greatest hope for the blind: retinal implants, which can be surgically inserted into the eye. (p. 13-14)

Bach-y-Rita began to think that the localizationist idea of  “one function, on location” couldn’t be right. The “visual” part of the cat’s brain was processing at least two other functions, touch and sound. He began to conceive of much of the brain as “polysensory” – that its sensory areas were able to process signals from more than one sense. (p. 17)

Masses of new research confirm that when a function is lost due to brain damage, other areas of the brain can take over and restore that function. Conventional rehabilitation efforts show that modest function can be regained, but has not invested enough time in such training. Various clinics are now proving that with intensive retraining – even years after a disabling brain injury – much if not all of the lost functions can be restored in many people.

The Taub clinic always uses the behavioral technique of “shaping,” taking an incremental approach to all tasks.

Taub patients drill six hours a day, for ten to fifteen days straight. They get exhausted and often have to nap. Patients do ten to twelve tasks a day, repeating each task ten times apiece. Improvement begins rapidly, then lessens progressively.

Treatment works for virtually all stroke survivors who are left with some ability to move their fingers – about half of patients who have had chronic strokes. The Taub clinic has since learned how to train people to use completely paralyzed hands. Taub began by treating people who had had milder strokes, but he has now shown, using control studies, that 80 percent of stroke patients who have lost arm function can improve substantially. Many of these people have had severe chronic strokes and showed very large improvements. Even patients who had had their strokes, on average, more than four years before beginning CI therapy benefited significantly. (p. 147)

Taub, Joachim Liepert, and colleagues from the University of Jena, Germany, have demonstrated that after a stroke the brain map for an affected arm shrinks by about half, so a stroke patient has only half the original number of neurons to work with. Taub believes that this is why stroke patients report that using the affected arm requires more effort. It is not only muscle atrophy that makes movement harder but also brain atrophy. When CI therapy restores the motor area of the brain to its normal size, using the arm becomes less tiring. (p. 149)

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has been very difficult to treat within conventional medicine, psychiatry and psychology. Using principles that accept neuroplasticity, it has been found that relabeling obsessive thoughts can produce dramatic improvements in people with OCD.

V.S. Ramachandran… believes that individual cases have everything to contribute to science… Ramachandran uses plasticity to reconfigure the content of our minds. (p. 178)

“Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to injury.” The brain gathers evidence from many sources before triggering pain. He has also said that “pain is an illusion” and that “our mind is a virtual reality machine,” which experiences the world indirectly and processes it at one remove, constructing a model in our head. So pain, like the body image, is a construct of our brain. (p. 192)

This is entirely consistent with my own explorations of pain through a method I developed, called WHEE: Wholistic Hybrid derived from EMDR and EFT. Going further than Ramachandran, I find that pain serves an important function: it is a messenger from our wise, inner self – alerting us to disharmonies in our lives and inviting us to address them. When we invite our unconscious mind to tell us what it wants us to know, the pain is decreased. This is the cognitive aspect of pain. The habit aspect of pain can be released as well with bilateral body stimulation combined with affirmations that are tailored to people's personal needs (Benor, 2009).

Doidge extends his hypotheses about brain functions to mental control over genetic expression.

When we learn, we alter which genes in our neurons are “expressed,” or turned on…
The “transcription function” Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on, or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is “transcribed” or read from the individual gene. This transcription function is influenced by what we do and think. (p. 220)

I very highly recommend this book to anyone working in the mental health field and to anyone interested in understanding how your mind can work to maximal potential. It will change your understanding about the brain and will change your life.

Reference:
Benor, Daniel J. Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release: Pain is a Choice and Suffering is Optional - WHEE for Tapping Your Pain Away. Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2009 (2nd Ed.)

Review by Daniel Benor, MD
Editor-in-Chief, IJHC