Do you want to remember people’s names or where you put your keys. Personally, I’d like to be able to read Stephen Hocking’s theories and actually understand them. I (Tony Almonte) recently read a book that should be of interest to all us LifePast50 members. Of particular note is that even as we get old, we can rewire our brain and improve that vital organ’s use.
Book review by Jessica Warner as published on April 7, 2007 in the Globe and Mail
The Brain That Changes Itself:
Stories of Personal Triumph
From the Frontiers of Brain Science
By Norman Doidge, Viking Press
It takes a rare talent to explain science to the rest of us. Oliver Sacks is a master at this. So was the late Stephen Jay Gould. A case can be made for John Emsley, one-time science writer in residence at Cambridge, and author, most recently, of Better Looking, Better Living, Better Loving: How Chemistry Can Help You Achieve Life’s Goals (2007).
And now there is Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist who divides his time between Columbia University and the University of Toronto. Four years ago, Doidge set himself the most cerebral of tasks: to understand a concept called neuroplasticity. He immersed himself in the literature, interviewed the leading researchers in the field, and sat down and talked with the people who have benefited from their discoveries. How he found the time, I do not know.
What makes neuroplasticity so exciting is that it completely upends how we look at the brain. It says that the brain, far from being a collection of specialized parts, each fixed in its location and function, is in fact a dynamic organ, one that can rewire and rearrange itself as the need arises. That need can arise when the brain is physically damaged, as it is by a stroke, or simply when it is allowed to go to seed, as it has in my case.
It is an insight from which all of us can benefit. People with severe afflictions — strokes, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, learning disabilities, obsessive compulsive disorders and the like — are the most obvious candidates, but who among us would not like to tack on a few IQ points or improve our memories?
To benefit from a concept, one must first grasp it, and that is what makes The Brain That Changes Itself such a terrific book. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to read it — just a person with a curious mind. Doidge is the best possible guide. He has a fluent and unassuming style, and is able to explain difficult concepts without talking down to his readers. These qualities are in short supply among academics, and for both, Doidge is to be warmly commended.
The case study is the psychiatric literary genre par excellence, and Doidge does not disappoint. There is a woman who manages quite well on just half a brain, an eye surgeon who made a remarkable recovery from a severe stroke, a seven-year-old who had to be taught how to hear pitch, an eight-year-old girl whose autism was holding her back from learning how to speak. Their stories are truly inspirational, and Doidge tells them with great compassion and sensitivity.
The descriptions of individual scientists are less felicitous. They talk excitedly (that is because they are always in the grip of an idea). They do eccentric (but harmless) things like paying tolls when they don’t have to. One “radiates a serious playfulness”; another is “obviously cerebral but radiates a boyish warmth toward his wife”; yet another dictates ideas “into his cell phone, in his crackling voice.” Each, in short, is as much a hero as a cliché, a loveable variant of the absent-minded professor.
There is nothing wrong with putting a face to science. My bet is that most readers will warm to this device. But it skirts the larger question of why scientific paradigms change in the first place. Because that is exactly what has happened in the case of neuroplasticity. A scientific revolution (Thomas Kuhn’s famous phrase) has taken place: Where people once thought of the brain as a fixed system, now they think of it as an open system.
I have no idea how this happened. I have a sneaking suspicion that William James, that subtlest of American philosophers, had a hand in it. One cannot read his Principles of Psychology (1890) without being struck by his innate grasp of neuroplasticity: “Experience is remolding us every moment,” “the brain-redistributions are in infinite variety” and so on.
That, however, is the subject for another book. I hope that it is Doidge who writes it because he is, as I have already said, a top-notch writer.
