Book Summary: The Brain’s Way of Healing, Doidge, N., M.D., (2015) Viking, New York.
Norman Doidge, M.D., lives in Toronto. He is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, researcher, author, essayist and poet. He is on faculty at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry, and Research Faculty at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, in New York. He is the author of two New York Times Bestsellers.
The first of these two books, The Brain that Heals Itself, outlined the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience—the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. In the second book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, he shows, for the first time, how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing really works. Now, in his third contribution to mental health, The Brain’s Way of Healing, Doidge offers us (as the cover says), “Remarkable discoveries and recoveries from the frontiers of neuroplasticity”.
Neuroplasticity is a very simple concept! It is the modification of brain structure through mental experience. It’s the increase in volume and complexity of certain areas of the brain in response to repeated conscious activities controlled by that area. For example, the violinist who practices for hours a day comes to have an increase in the brain area responsible for fine movements of the hand; the London cabbie who has to memorize the map of the city of London has an increase in the size of the brain devoted to spatial mapping, and the wine connoisseur has an increase in the size and complexity of the areas devoted to smell and taste.
And, it turns out, we can be involved in actively increasing an area of the brain which may not have developed due to disuse or trauma. Doidge shows how being conscious of what we do – going off automatic pilot – and being deliberate in our movements can overcome the devastation of strokes or central nervous system disorders. He does not offer a one-size-fits-all “cure” for the devastating illnesses that can afflict the mind and the body. What he does do, in a highly personal and friendly tone, is to describe how neuroplastic techniques – everything from the use of sound and light to the regimens of meditation, yoga and chanting can and have been used to fight dementia, Parkinson’s, ADD, ADHD and the symptoms which make up the autistic spectrum.
This is a book you can truly enjoy. The theories are presented with a rare combination of technical precision and layman’s explanation and the stories of those who have embraced pasticity are “awesome” and truly heart-warming. Those of us in the helping professions need to really incorporate the idea that the brain can no longer be thought of as a black box or a fixed-at-birth organ. What we do with our clients and what they do in return changes them – changes their brain – in ways we can begin to learn about if we choose.
ISBN: 978-0670025503
