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and learned another pain lesson: the wise use of sufficient morphine during his acute pain prevented his nerves from being chronically stimulated and saved him from developing a chronic pain syndrome.
Neuropathic pain occurs because of the behavior of neurons that make up our brain maps for pain. The external areas of our body are represented in our brain, in specific processing areas, called brain maps. Touch a part of the body’s surface, and a specific part of the brain map, devoted to that spot, will start to fire.
Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing. The acute pain has developed an afterlife: it becomes chronic pain
Plasticity can be a blessing when the ongoing sensory input we receive is pleasurable, for it allows us to develop a brain that is better able to perceive and to savor pleasant sensations; but that same plasticity can be a curse when the sensory system that is receiving ongoing input is the pain system.
That can happen when a person slips a disc, which then presses repeatedly on a nerve root in her spine. Her pain map for the area becomes hypersensitive, and she begins to feel pain not only when the disc hits the nerve when she moves the wrong way, but even when the disc is not pressing hard. The pain signal reverberates throughout her brain, so that pain persists even after its original stimulus has stopped. (Something similar, and even more drastic, happens in phantom limb pain, when
Wall and Melzack showed how a chronic injury not only makes the cells in the pain system fire more easily but can also cause our pain maps to enlarge their “receptive field” (the area of the body’s surface that they map for), so that we begin to feel pain over a larger area of our body’s surface.
Wall and Melzack also showed that as maps enlarge, pain signals in one map can “spill” into adjacent pain maps. Then we may develop referred pain, when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another, some distance away.
Ultimately, the brain maps for pain begin to fire so easily that the person ends up in excruciating, unremitting pain, felt over a large area of the body—all in response to the smallest stimulation of a nerve.
The name for this well-documented neuroplastic process is wind-up pain, because the more the receptors in the pain system fire, the more sensitive they become.
caught in a vicious cycle, a brain trap: each time he had an attack of pain, his plastic brain got more sensitive to it, making it worse, setting him up for a new, still worse attack next time. The intensity of his pain signal, the length of time it lasted, and the amount of space in the body it “occupied” all increased. It was a case of plasticity gone wild.
Could he, by fiddling with the timing of input to his brain, start to weaken links that had formed in his pain maps?
That observation explained why, when we are in pain, we can’t concentrate or think well; why we have sensory problems and often can’t tolerate certain sounds or light; why we can’t move more gracefully;
What if, when he was in pain, he could try to override the natural tendency to retreat, lie down, rest, stop thinking, and nurse himself? Moskowitz decided the brain needed a counterstimulation. He would force those brain areas to process anything-but-pain, to weaken his chronic pain circuits.
Moskowitz knew that when a particular brain area is processing acute pain, only about 5 percent of the neurons in that area are dedicated to processing pain. In chronic pain, the constant firing and wiring lead to an increase, so that 15 to 25 percent of the neurons in the area are now dedicated to pain processing. So about 10 to 20 percent of neurons get pirated to process chronic pain. Those were what he would have to steal back.
Each time he got an attack of pain, he immediately began visualizing.
He greeted every twinge of pain with an image of his pain map shrinking, knowing that he was forcing his posterior cingulate and posterior parietal lobes to process a visual image.
Brain scan studies demonstrate that when the placebo effect occurs, brain structure changes. Placebo cures are not “less real” than cures by medication. They are examples of neuroplasticity in action: mind changing brain structure.
I have come to suspect that learned nonuse is such a common phenomenon in the brain because “going dormant” is a common strategy when a cell, or a more complex organ or organism, finds itself in a situation in which its normal ways of adapting to the environment fail.*
In summary, though such patients cannot perform certain tasks, only some of the neurons that normally process those tasks are dead; others are alive but distressed and firing irregular, noisy signals, and others are merely dormant because they are getting bad signals.
But neuroscientists really do not know where “in” the neurons thoughts are encoded. Nor do they know if they are “in” individual neurons (highly unlikely), or in the connections between the neurons, or distributed throughout the brain. This mystery of the mind remains unsolved.
that learning and skills are encoded not “in” specific neurons, or even “in” the connections between neurons, but “in” the cumulative electrical wave patterns that are the result of all the neurons firing together.
Correction of general cellular functions of the neurons and glia.
Neurostimulation. In almost all the interventions in this book, some kind of energy-based neurostimulation of the brain cells is required. Light, sound, electricity, vibration, movement, and thought (which turns on certain networks) all provide neurostimulation.
The Brain That Changes Itself,
Many people with brain problems are exhausted, and poor sleepers. A recent discovery by Maiken Nedergaard from the University of Rochester showed that in sleep the glia open up special channels that allow waste products and toxic buildups (including the proteins that build up in dementia) to be discharged from the brain through the cerebral spinal fluid, which bathes much of the brain. This unique channel system is ten times more active in the sleeping brain than in the waking state.
wrong. The energy from normal sunlight passes through the skin to influence the blood, for instance. The lecture notice described using light to cure “neonatal jaundice” as one example.
Investigations soon proved that the wavelengths of visible blue light—passing through the babies’ skin and blood vessels to reach the blood and perhaps the liver too—had caused this marvelous curative effect. Using light to treat jaundice became mainstream. Sister Ward’s chance discovery proved we are not as opaque as we imagine ourselves to be.
recent study showed that a full spectrum of light could be as effective as medication for some depressed patients, with fewer side effects.
also in the optic nerve, to a clump of cells in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which regulates our biological clock.
Every morning when we awaken, and light enters our eyes, it passes to the SCN and rouses each of our organ systems in its turn.
In 1979 Moscow University scientists Karel Martinek and Ilya Berezin showed that our bodies are filled with numerous light-sensitive chemical switches and amplifiers
The frequency most often used for laser healing is red light, at a wavelength of 660 nanometers.
However, after a few laser treatments, the body started healing those wounds, and over the following weeks, the wounds closed.
Yet here were pictures of patients whose cartilage had been regenerated by laser therapy.
Kahn also showed cases of people with rheumatoid arthritis, including the severe juvenile form, who got better with lasers.
Knowing which brain areas were involved in the woman’s cognitive deficits, Saltmarche suggested eight areas on her head on which to focus the lights. The lights used were not lasers proper but LED lights, in the red and infrared range, which have some laserlike properties.
When a sensory part of the brain is damaged, it tends to fire too easily, and we feel overloaded by the sensations. The sensory systems consist of two kinds of neurons, those that get excited by external sensations and those inhibitory neurons that dampen sensations so that the brain is not overwhelmed and just the right amount is filtered in.
By 1965 it was known that low-intensity lasers could heal. Shirley A. Carney, working in Birmingham, England, showed that low-intensity lasers could promote the growth of collagen fibers in skin tissues.
Human beings tend to think that light-sensitive molecules exist only in the eyes, but they come in four major types: rhodopsin (in the retina, which absorbs light for vision), hemoglobin (in red blood cells), myoglobin (in muscle), and most important of all, cytochrome (in all the cells). Cytochrome is the marvel that explains how lasers can heal so many different conditions, because it converts light energy from the sun into energy for the cells. Most of the photons are absorbed by the energy powerhouses within the cells, the mitochondria.
Typically, the therapist will cover a body surface with red light for about twenty-five minutes.
infrared band of LEDs for about twenty-five minutes.
A physician who had completely ripped a shoulder tendon and was scheduled for surgery got so much better he canceled his operation. Another person, referred for chronic sinusitis, found that it improved, along with his hearing, while the ringing in his ears decreased. The improvements in all these people were permanent, so they didn’t require ongoing treatment. A few people didn’t get better, but they all stopped their sessions after only a few of them.
I was becoming convinced that lasers, in Kahn’s and his colleagues’ hands, were rapidly healing all sorts of things that should not be healed—cartilage, badly torn tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
Differentiation—making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements—builds brain maps. Newborns,
Slowness of movement is the key to awareness, and awareness is the key to learning.
people could
One of the most important things Feldenkrais took from Kano and judo was the understanding of reversibility: actions, to be intelligent, must be performed in such a way that, at any given moment, they can be stopped or reversed—turned in the opposite direction. The secret was never to move—or live—compulsively. (Living or performing actions compulsively is the opposite of doing them
face
surgeon. William Bates, who lived from 1860 to 1931, treated many common eye problems successfully and even, on occasion, cured some kinds of blindness using what were in effect neuroplastic exercises. Bates did for vision what Feldenkrais did for movement: he showed that it is not a passive sensory process but requires movement, and that the habitual ways the eyes move affect the eyesight.
pressure). Bates measured the vision of tens of thousands of pairs of eyes and realized that visual clarity—how blurry things appear—fluctuates, especially when people are stressed.
