[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: Your Plastic Brain

[Dan Bolser]

Just for fun...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: KnowledgeNews <info at knowledgenews.net>
Date: 2008/5/10
Subject: Your Plastic Brain




Special Issue
Your Plastic Brain

Not that kind of plastic!

We've covered brain anatomy. We've quizzed brain basics. Now, we bring
you a from-the-front-lines look at what today's scientists are
discovering about "neuroplasticity," your brain's ability to change
itself. It's a topic too big for our brains. So for help, we're
turning to Dr. Norman Doidge, author of the bestselling book The Brain
That Changes Itself. For the rest of this issue, Dr. Doidge will show
you . . .

The Discovery of the Century:
Your Plastic Brain

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Recently I wrote a book about the revolutionary discovery that the
human brain can change itself. Without operations or medications,
scientists, doctors, and patients have made use of the brain's
hitherto unknown ability to change. Some of these people had what were
thought to be incurable brain problems; others simply wanted to
improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged.

For 400 years, this venture would have been inconceivable because
mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed.
The common wisdom was that after childhood the brain changed only when
it began the long process of decline; that when brain cells failed to
develop properly, or were injured, or died, they could not be
replaced. Nor could the brain ever alter its structure and find a new
way to function if part of it was damaged.

The theory of the unchanging brain decreed that people who were born
with brain or mental limitations, or who sustained brain damage, would
be limited or damaged for life. Scientists who wondered if the healthy
brain might be improved or preserved through activity or mental
exercise were told not to waste their time.

A neurological nihilism--a sense that treatment for many brain
problems was ineffective or even unwarranted--had taken hold, and it
spread through our culture, even stunting our view of human nature.
Since the brain could not change, human nature, which emerges from it,
seemed necessarily fixed and unalterable as well.

A Glorious Machine:
Hardwired?

The belief that the brain could not change had three major sources:
the fact that brain-damaged patients could so rarely make full
recoveries; our inability to observe the living brain's microscopic
activities; and the idea--dating back to the beginnings of modern
science--that the brain is like a glorious machine. And while machines
do many extraordinary things, they don't change and grow.

I became interested in the idea of a changing brain because of my work
as a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. 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" 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.

When I first heard news that the human brain might not be hardwired, I
had to investigate and weigh the evidence for myself. I began a series
of travels, and in the process I met a band of brilliant scientists,
at the frontiers of brain science, who had, in the late 1960s or early
1970s, made a series of unexpected discoveries.

They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each
different activity it performed, perfecting its circuits so it was
better suited to the task at hand. If certain "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 scientists were seeing. They began to call this
fundamental brain property "neuroplasticity."

The Word of the Day:
Neuroplasticity!

Neuro is for "neuron," the nerve cells in our brains and nervous
systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable." At first
many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in
their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a
fanciful notion.

Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging
brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental
abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often
reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often
substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced;
that many "circuits" and even basic reflexes that we think are
hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking,
learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our
brain anatomy and our behavior--surely one of the most extraordinary
discoveries of the 20th century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who
had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the
deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before
and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with
neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were
cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible
for 80-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they
did when they were 55. I saw people rewire their brains with their
thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas.

The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function
through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important
alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its
basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.
Like all revolutions, this one will have profound effects. The
neuroplastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our
understanding of how love, grief, relationships, learning, addictions,
culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains.

All of the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, insofar
as they deal with human nature, are affected, as are all forms of
training. All of these disciplines 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 in the course of our lives. The human brain has
underestimated itself.

--Norman Doidge, MD

About the Author

Dr. Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher, as well
as an author, essayist, and poet. His book, The Brain That Changes
Itself, is available at all booksellers.


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