Thinking makes it so
THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF:
Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
By Norman Doidge
448 pp. Penguin Paperback $16
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
Neuroscientists explore the brain as the Hubble explores outer space: traveling purposefully through uncharted territory. Yet even though the brain allows for hands-on study, it remains as compelling a mystery as the universe, challenging great minds to plumb its depths.
In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, researcher, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, takes readers on a journey through early brain research that led to current findings that our brain is plastic: “changeable, malleable, modifiable” for as long as its owner lives.
Doidge stands on this platform and expounds on the brain’s remarkable abilities while devoting significant coverage to early research and the way one finding laid the groundwork for the next. New discoveries sprang from serendipity; patients who responded in unexpected ways guided researchers to look in a new direction. With delicate wiring far more intricate than the motherboard of a computer, the brain’s secrets are elusive, but researchers continue to follow clues based on human response.
Anecdotes and case studies provide the human faces on which Doidge shines scientific findings. We meet a woman who regains her balance using an electronic device she holds on her tongue, one who’s born with half a brain that “rewires” to function as the missing hemisphere would, and a man who overcomes his growing dependence on sado-masochistic pornography, to name a few.
Doidge shows us how the practical application of new information has borne fruit in educating special-needs students, treating the mentally ill, reversing paralysis, dealing with phantom limb pain, strengthening memory, and much more.
This “neuroplastic revolution,” he writes, “has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addictions, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains.”
He gives each item on this list—and who isn’t curious about these areas of our lives? —a detailed chapter written in laymen’s terms. There is some neurological vocabulary—synapse, dendrites, hippocampus—but anyone interested enough in the brain to pull this book from a bookstore shelf will be quite capable of assimilating the terms.
Our brain’s flexibility opens the door to greater control of all aspects of our lives, but Doidge says the latest news from “neuroplasticians,” a term he coins, isn’t all positive:
“ . . . [plasticity] renders our brains not only more resourceful but also more vulnerable to outside influences. Neuroplasticity has the power to produce more flexible but also more rigid behaviors—a phenomenon I call ‘the plastic paradox.’”
In this 448-page book, 285 are actual text; the other 163 include an appendix, notes and references, and an index. Doidge has clearly done his research.
While it’s encouraging to realize that we do in fact have the ability to control and even manipulate brain function, it’s not quite as simple as that. The title suggests that the brain “changes itself.” It would be more accurate to say that the brain can be changed by significant intervention—therapy, self-talk, electronic devices—but left to itself most likely will continue in whatever rut it has settled into. Habits are hard to break.
Michael Merzenich, whom Doidge quotes liberally, has been studying the brain’s plasticity for nearly thirty years, according to his website. Merzenich leads a company, Posit Science, and we learn from Doidge the tremendous benefits he’s brought to his patients. What Doidge doesn’t mention, but a quick Google search discovers, is that Merzenich’s revolutionary program is quite pricey. Doidge stops just short of an infomercial.
Strangely, it is in the appendix , an oft-ignored section, that Doidge departs from reportage and poses some intriguing questions, among them: What is the relationship between the brain and culture? Here readers will find the most interesting information in the book.
Doidge describes the Sea Gypsies, a nomadic tribe from islands off the coast of Thailand, as an intriguing example of how culture changes brain structure. According to Doidge, these people learn to swim before they walk, and as a result of their diving to depths of thirty feet since childhood, their eyes see as clearly at that depth as ours do on land.
“The Sea Gypsies’ underwater vision is just one example of how cultural activities can change brain circuits, in this case leading to a new and seemingly impossible change in perception,” Doidge writes.
It is in the appendix that he asks if our brains are stuck in the Pleistocene age. His discussion of the hunter-gatherer brain is captivating, although surely speculative. He asks, “Why is it that human beings, and not other animals which also have plastic brains, developed culture?” And “What happens when the brain is caught between two cultures?”
He discusses how media reorganizes the brain, quoting from Merzenich:
“Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure [to the Internet] —but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary ‘tools,’ etc.”
Perhaps all this is hidden in the appendix because it is speculative and not yet proven by traditional scientific methods, but I’m glad I didn’t overlook it as I’m prone to do with appendices. It deserves a book of its own.
Apart from a brief comment that there is a potential for misuse of the brain’s plasticity—brainwashing being the assumption—Doidge leaves speculations about the future of neuroplasticity to the reader. Lay readers with an interest in neuroscience shouldn’t hesitate to get their hands on the book—it’s full of fascinating information, and provides a solid overview of how neuroscientists have arrived at current conclusions.
And be sure to read the appendix.
Ruth Douillette is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.
See her blog at Upstream and Down~.
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