![]() Far more than once dreamed possible, the brain can-if not always cure-heal itself.ĭoidge wrote about the brain’s remarkable ability to recalibrate itself-what doctors call neuroplasticity-in his 2007 bestseller The Brain That Changes Itself. The brain is actually a supple, malleable organ, as ready to unlearn as it is to learn, capable of transforming vicious circles into virtuous circles, of resetting and repairing its internal communications. ![]() That concept no longer stands up to scrutiny. The prevailing 20th-century view was that it was too specialized for its own good-a fixed machine made up of discrete parts that can break down, never to function again. Those individuals, and thousands like them, achieved those results, writes Norman Doidge, a Toronto psychiatrist and author of The Brain’s Way of Healing, precisely because the human brain is a generalist par excellence. And in California, a psychiatrist and pain specialist rids himself of 13 years of chronic pain within a year, without drugs or surgery, through his brain’s own efforts. ![]() A Broadway singer, silenced for 30 years by multiple sclerosis, recovers his voice. A South African man with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that often leaves its sufferers immobile, walks his symptoms into submission. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |