Rewiring your brain, with Norman Doidge
11 October 2010After reading this interview with Norman Doidge, your brain will increase the number of connections between certain nerve cells. The concept of such 'neuroplasticity' has come to be widely accepted after Doidge wrote the best-selling book The Brain that Changes Itself.
Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself.
When I meet up with Norman Doidge it's at the end of a long day of interviews and he looks exhausted. "Give me a few minutes to get myself together," he says wearily as he ducks up to his hotel room for a few minutes of quiet. He returns with dark chocolate and popcorn, and over coffee he perks up and talks to me about the power of the mind and the best-selling The Brain That Changes Itself.
The literary neuroscience book uses case studies and research to show that our thoughts can change the actual structure and physiology of our brain - a theory known as neuroplasticity. When the book came out in 2007 (2008 in Australia), it revolutionised the way scientists thought about the brain, which researchers have long thought was unchangeable and machine-like.
For a man who has overthrown hundreds of years of neuroscience, Doidge is much more softly spoken than I would imagine. He's calm, attentive and patient and I can't picture him rushing out to crush an established theory. As it turns out, my impression of him is correct, and the events that led up to the publication weren't a rush at all - more a slow build up of mounting evidence that Doidge could no longer avoid.
"On the one hand, the research for the book was five years, and on the other hand it was all of my professional life," says Doidge as he offers me a piece of dark chocolate.
It was worth the time, the book has been hovering on the non-fiction best sellers lists for the past three years and has been reprinted 10 times - something that Doidge still finds surprising. But not quite as surprising as the concept of neuroplasticity itself.
"When I think about it I'm still like 'wow' - I still have to pinch myself. For so long we've been told that when areas are damaged you can't really expect the brain to reorganise itself. And so when I'm asked about whether a condition can be helped, the old reflexes are there ready to be very, very cautious and say, 'No, it's not possible'. But [...] I've seen so many amazing recoveries."
Doidge has captured some of these recoveries in his book and has since made two films on neuroplasticity, one by the same name and Changing Your Mind. Here's what he had to say about science writing, comparisons with The Secret and backlash from his book, during an interview in Sydney, in August 2010.
You've shown that thoughts and exercises can change our brain, how is this helping to treat people with neurological conditions?
There are so many approaches that doctors can take. One example is when a person has a stroke and they lose control of one arm - they'll try to use the affected arm but it doesn't work, so the brain learns not to use it and that brain area wastes away. But if we put the good arm in a sling or cast so they can't use it, then that bad arm is used incrementally. Scans show that by doing this, neighbouring tissue in the brain takes over moving the bad arm.
How exactly do thoughts control the structure of our brain?
From work on snails we can see that when animals are taught something, they double the number of connections between nerve cells. And we've shown that when learning occurs, genes are turned on in neurons that make proteins that go onto build these connections.
Now, that's been demonstrated, that's fact, that's not theory. Do we actually know where there is awareness or how those genes are stimulated? No, we don't know that yet. And we may never know, but we can already see the plasticity happening down to the genetic level.
Has there been any backlash since your book?
Very little to my face! The neuroplasticians I wrote about were almost all attacked pretty viciously by colleagues. Many experiments that they did in this area had to be done off grant - meaning they either had to pay for it or squirrel money off one grant to do this research. One of the most gratifying things about having written this book and one of the most gratifying things about its reception is that so many of the major neuroscientists now believe in neuroplasticity.
How did you manage to write on such a complicated topic while appealing to a general audience?
The actual writing of the book took maybe four or five years - there was a chapter (chapter three) that I rewrote 30 times. It was tough because I wanted to be completely true to the neuroscience, so I went off and immersed myself in the jargon and the scientific language - and I came back speaking it. I remember my wife helping me write the manuscript and saying, "How are you going to write a chapter about this?" It was as though I had to relearn to speak English.
Was it hard to find a balance between case studies and the facts?
There was a lot of thought given to it and my editor was very helpful. Early on I had the option of making it more like a textbook and putting readers to sleep, or working very hard to find examples of stories where there was a practitioner and a patient whose story I could marry together.
I learnt how to treat the scientific details as what a novelist would call back story, and to foreground personal stories so that the book would read like a page turner in a novel and still have the details and satisfy the neuroscientists involved.
I tried to keep my mind on the bigger picture. On the one hand it looks like it's a book of individual chapters about different investigators or doctors or patients. But this isn't just a clinical book, this is about re-conceiving the brain and learning to some extent what human potential is about. And it's about re-conceiving how culture influences the brain - it's not just that the brain produces culture, but that culture rewires the brain.
How do you feel about comparisons with books/films like The Secret?
I find that the problem with The Secret is the magical idea that at some level, if you wish for success it will accrue. And that bad things happen because you brought it upon yourself with negative thoughts. I mean have these people not heard of the Holocaust? Did those one million babies that were thrown into gas chambers deserve it because they were thinking negative thoughts? It's taking the idea of positive thinking and extrapolating it to the absurd.
How did making films on the subject differ to writing the book?
I didn't realise before I made the film how crucial and meaningful it would be to actually have these main stories documented visually. You know, some people are reflex sceptics and other writers take liberties and exaggerate things. I didn't exaggerate anything in the book knowingly, and frankly there was no need to exaggerate things. It's very rare that one has the opportunity in life to be exposed to an idea that turns out to be this big. But the film gives people the chance to see these things that I've seen and judge for themselves.
What's next for you and the field?
Scientists are trying to understand a fuller range of applications of neuroplasticity. There are still a number of unsolved problems about how the brain works and we need to deepen our understanding of how the mind can change the physical.
I'm working on a new book at the moment, I'm updating the reader on developments in the field. But I'm no longer trying to show that neuroplasticity is real - that's a fact.
Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
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Saturday, January 01, 2011
Cosmos Online - Rewiring Your Brain, with Norman Doidge
New year, why not a newly rewired brain to go with it. And I'll bet some of you are needing that right now if you partied a little too hard last night. Anyway, interesting interview. By the way, if you haven't read The Brain that Changes Itself yet, it's a good book.
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