The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

We detect mistakes with our orbital frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes.

Once the orbital frontal cortex has fired the “mistake feeling,” it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus, located in the deepest part of the cortex. The cingulate triggers the dreadful anxiety that something bad is going to happen unless we correct the mistake and sends signals to both the gut and the heart, causing the physical sensations we associate with dread.

The “automatic gearshift,” the caudate nucleus, sits deep in the center of the brain and allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next unless, as happens in OCD, the caudate becomes extremely “sticky.”

This new circuit can eventually compete with the older one, and according to use it or lose it, the pathological networks will weaken. With this treatment we don’t so much “break” bad habits as replace bad behaviors with better ones.

The first step is for a person having an OCD attack to relabel what is happening to him,

Cognitive Therapy, is based on the premise that problematic mood and anxiety states are caused by cognitive distortions—inaccurate or exaggerated thoughts.

After a patient has acknowledged that the worry is a symptom of OCD, the next crucial step is to refocus on a positive, wholesome, ideally pleasure-giving activity the moment he becomes aware he is having an OCD attack.

It is essential to do something, to “shift” the gear manually.

it essential to understand that it is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do. “The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling”

plasticity to reconfigure the content of our minds. He shows that we can rewire our brains through comparatively brief, painless treatments that use imagination and perception.

human beings are notoriously susceptible to self-deception, whether scientists or not.”

Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body.

What they need instead is “neuroplastic surgery” to change their body image.

According to Ramachandran, pain, like the body image, is created by the brain and projected onto the body. This assertion is contrary to common sense and the traditional neurological view of pain that says that when we are hurt, our pain receptors send a one-way signal to the brain’s pain center and that the intensity of pain perceived is proportional to the seriousness of the injury.

Wall and Melzack’s theory asserted that the pain system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and far from being a passive recipient of pain, the brain always controls the pain signals we feel.

“gate control theory of pain” proposed a series of controls, or “gates,” between the site of injury and the brain. When pain messages are sent from damaged tissue through the nervous system, they pass through several “gates,” starting in the spinal cord, before they get to the brain. But these messages travel only if the brain gives them “permission,” after determining they are important enough to be let through.

The gate theory led to new treatments for blocking pain. Wall coinvented “transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation,” or TENS, which uses electric current to stimulate neurons that inhibit pain, helping in effect to close the gate.

acupuncture, which reduces pain by stimulating points of the body often far from the site where the pain is felt. It seemed possible that acupuncture turns on neurons that inhibit pain, closing gates and blocking pain perception.

The idea that living things change their forms was widely accepted; the power of the mind to influence the body was taken for granted, and illusion was seen as so fundamental a force that it was represented in the deity Maya, the goddess of illusion.

we can change our brain anatomy simply by using our imaginations.

when human beings learn a new skill, plastic change occurs.

Maintaining improvement and making a skill permanent require the slow steady work that probably forms new connections.

thoughts, repeated in “mental practice,” must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones.

mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

Experts don’t store the answers, but they do store key facts and strategies that help them get answers,

we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.

Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.

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In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one’s muscles actually strengthens them.

brain is plastic and physically changes its state and structure as we think,

neuroplasticity, which promotes change, can also lead to rigidity and repetition in the brain,

“The system is plastic, not elastic,” Pascual-Leone says in a booming voice. An elastic band can be stretched, but it always reverts to its former shape, and the molecules are not rearranged in the process. The plastic brain is perpetually altered by every encounter, every interaction.

The mental “tracks” that get laid down can lead to habits, good or bad.

to develop a new pathway, you have to block or constrain its competitor, which is often the most commonly used pathway.

The human brain can reorganize so quickly because individual parts of the brain are not necessarily committed to processing particular senses. We can, and routinely do, use parts of our brains for many different tasks.

Pascual-Leone, “our brains are not truly organized in terms of systems that process a given sensory modality. Rather, our brain is organized in a series of specific operators.”

for any brain activity, the ablest group of neurons is selected to do the task.

people learning a new skill can recruit operators devoted to other activities, vastly increasing their processing power, provided they can create a roadblock between the operator they need and its usual function.

Everything your “immaterial” mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level.

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Kandel was the first to show that as we learn, our individual neurons alter their structure and strengthen the synaptic connections between them. He was also first to demonstrate that when we form long-term memories, neurons change their anatomical shape and increase the number of synaptic connections they have to other neurons

a short-term memory becomes long-term when a chemical in the neuron, called protein kinase A, moves from the body of the neuron into its nucleus, where genes are stored. The protein turns on a gene to make a protein that alters the structure of the nerve ending, so that it grows new connections between the neurons.

the “transcription function.” Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on, or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is “transcribed” or read from the individual gene. This transcription function is influenced by what we do and think.

we can shape our genes, which in turn shape our brain’s microscopic anatomy.

memories are not written down once, or “engraved,” to remain unchanged forever but can be altered by subsequent events and retranscribed.

Freud wrote that from time to time memory traces are subjected to “a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a retranscription

patients were reliving past memories without being aware of it. Freud called this unconscious phenomenon “transference” because patients were transferring scenes and ways of perceiving from the past onto the present. They were “reliving” them instead of “remembering” them.

patients projected these “transferences” not only onto him but onto other people in their lives, without being aware of doing so, and that viewing others in a distorted way often got them into difficulty.

an attuned mother does, when she develops the orbitofrontal system, by pointing out emotional “basics”—helping him name his emotions, their triggers, and how they influenced his mental and bodily states. Soon, he was able to spot the triggers and emotions himself.

We all have defense mechanisms, really reaction patterns, that hide unbearably painful ideas, feelings, and memories from conscious awareness.

According to neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms and neuroscientist Oliver Turnbull, “The aim of the talking cure…from the neurobiological point of view [is] to extend the functional sphere of influence of the prefrontal lobes.”

The newest brain scans show that when we dream, that part of the brain that processes emotion, and our sexual, survival, and aggressive instincts, is quite active. At the same time the prefrontal cortex system, which is responsible for inhibiting our emotions and instincts, shows lower activity.