The Brain that Changes Itself Book Summary - The Brain that Changes Itself Book explained in key points

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The Brain that Changes Itself summary

Name: The Brain that Changes Itself
Rating: 4.6 (247 reviews)
Author: Norman Doidge

Norman Doidge

Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

4.6 (247 ratings)

22 mins

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The Brain that Changes Itself
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What’s in it for me? Discover the awesome regenerative power of your brain.

Doctor Who and your brain have a lot more in common than you might think. Your brain, just like the Doctor, is able to regenerate itself time and time again. It can heal itself after injury, it can grow from experience and it can even change the physical strength of your body.

These blinks showcase the incredible elasticity of the brain. They explain just how well the organ can change and develop itself in response to injury, threats and stimuli – which is a big part of what makes us humans so adaptable.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why you’re not stuck with the libido you’re born with;
why you can think some of your problems away; and
how actively thinking may help us beat dementia one day.

The brain changes itself through processes like “unmasking.”

For years it was thought that the brain, once fully formed, was fixed until it deteriorated with age. But with the rise of neuroplasticity, we’re discovering this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continually change itself. The prefix “neuro” refers to neurons, i.e., the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems, and the suffix “plastic” means changeable. The brain, then, alters its nerve structure and function through thought and activity.

But how exactly does the brain reorganize itself? One way is through unmasking.

Unmasking describes what happens when one neural pathway is shut off and a secondary one is exposed, the latter becoming stronger with repeated use.

Cheryl Schiltz is a great example of this phenomenon. For five years, each time she stood up, she would lose her balance. She had almost entirely lost the vestibular system of her brain – the area needed for balance. That is, until one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity, Paul Bach-y-Rita, designed a special device that Schiltz could wear.

The device, called an accelerometer, sent signals to a plastic strip containing electrodes, which had been placed on Schiltz’s tongue. The sensations on her tongue were then redirected to the area in Schiltz’s brain that processed balance, rather than going where they normally went: to the sensory cortex, the area that processes touch.

After much practice with the device, a new pathway in Schiltz's brain was unmasked and strengthened, and she began to regain her balance on her own.

Stimulating activities can change the structure of the brain.

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.

The brain is plastic, when the body changes the brain changes too.

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.

Our sexual libido is also plastic and changeable.

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.

Brains can be rewired through shaping and brain exercises.

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.

Brain scans enable us to develop plasticity-based treatments to help OCD sufferers.

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.

Imagination alone can help the brain overcome the pain of lost limbs.

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.

Imaginative thinking can change the brain by improving performance and strengthening muscles.

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.

Psychoanalysis, or talk therapy, is a neuroplastic therapy.

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.

Neuronal stem cells can help us preserve our brains in old age.

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.

Mirror region takeover is another kind of brain plasticity.

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.

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What is The Brain that Changes Itself about?

How can stroke victims who become paralyzed start using a fork or buttoning their shirts again? Well, contrary to what was believed for so long, the brain is not hardwired. It can change, regenerate and grow. Drawing on real-life cases of scientists, doctors and patients, The Brain that Changes Itself (2007) shows us how, rather than relying on surgery and medicine, we can alter our brains through thought and behavior.

Best quote from The Brain that Changes Itself

[Nature] has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.

—Norman Doidge

Who should read The Brain that Changes Itself?

Anyone who wants to change their habits
Psychology students
Anyone seeking inspiration while recovering from an injury

About the Author

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry. His work has been published in many popular media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, TIME and The Guardian. Doidge has appeared frequently on TV and radio and is a New York Times bestselling author.

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