The Brain that Changes Itself summary

It’s great that the brain can change, but don’t we need some sophisticated gadgetry to help us? Actually, no. We can change our brain by simply being in stimulating environments where we can exercise our brain, not just our body.

Activity can actually change the structure of our brain. Mark Rosenzweig at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the first people to demonstrate this in his experiments with rats.

Eminent brain scientist Michael Merzenich is best known for his work with brain maps. By using brain maps, we can train specific processing areas in our brain, reorganizing it and altering how we think and perceive. But what are brain maps exactly?

Brain maps show which sections of the brain control which parts of the body and how the movements of those parts are processed.

We’ve seen how we can recover and improve our skills, but brain plasticity doesn’t stop there. Our sex drive is also flexible. The human libido can be easily shaped by psychology and past sexual encounters. But how does this work?

Plasticity is a characteristic of all brain tissue, though some brain regions are more plastic than others.

Dr. Bernstein was an eye surgeon who lost the use of his left hand after he suffered a stroke at age 54. Hoping for some improvement, Bernstein began using Edward Taub’s constraint-induced (CI) movement therapy. When he started, he couldn’t lift a spoon to his mouth, or button up his shirt. By the end of his therapy, he was writing with his left hand and enjoying tennis three times a week.

Bernstein had healed himself through simple exercises like wiping tables and cleaning windows – repetitive actions that rewired his brain.

We all worry. But for someone affected by anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), worrying escalates to degrees that can feel almost impossible to get a grip on. Thankfully, understanding the plasticity of our brain can help break the anxiety cycle and a host of other undesirable habits.

Brain scans can give us a better understanding of afflictions like OCD. They show a considerable difference between the brains of OCD patients and those unaffected by it, as revealed by UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz.

Losing a limb is a devastating event. But what if your missing limb caused you pain on top of that? This is known as phantom pain, feeling pain in a limb that is no longer there.

Phantom pain often afflicts soldiers with amputations and those who have lost limbs in accidents, but it’s part of a larger group of pains that have no source in the body.

According to Alvaro Pascual-Leone from Harvard Medical School, we can change our brain simply by using our imagination.

For example, we can use visualization to improve our performance of an activity. In one experiment, Pascual-Leone assembled two groups of people who had never played piano before. One group sat in front of a piano, twice a day, five days a week, and imagined playing and hearing a piano sequence. The other group actually practiced piano for the same amount of time.

Psychotherapy is sometimes scoffed at, but people often forget that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was already using concepts based on plasticity in the nineteenth century.

Though this insight came to be associated with Donald Hebb 60 years later, it was Freud who stated that when two neurons fire simultaneously, this makes them continue to work or “wire” together. In psychotherapy, this was already demonstrated through free-association – when a patient says everything that comes to mind after being prompted by a word or cue. Free-association uncovered many interesting connections in the patient’s mind.

For years it was thought that the brain couldn’t regenerate itself the way other organs, like skin, can. We thought that, as we got older, millions upon millions of our irreplaceable neurons simply died out. That is, until we discovered neuronal stem cells: brain cells that don’t age.

Stem cells are cells that haven’t yet divided or differentiated into neurons or glial cells, which support neurons in the brain. Stem cells look identical to one another and what is amazing about them is that they can continually replicate copies of themselves without any signs of aging. This process, known as neurogenesis, carries on until we die.

We’ve seen that the brain is remarkably plastic and has a number of ways of changing. But there is another type of plasticity that we haven’t talked about yet: mirror region takeover.

Mirror region takeover is when one part of our brain hemisphere fails in some way and the region in the opposite hemisphere – its “mirror” region – attempts to take control of its function.