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

by Norman Doidge

The first step is for a person having an OCD attack to relabel what is happening to him, so that he realizes that what he is experiencing is not an attack of germs, AIDS, or battery acid but an episode of OCD. He should remember that brain lock occurs in the three parts of the brain. As a therapist, I encourage OCD patients to make the following summary for themselves: “Yes, I do have a real problem right now. But it is not germs, it is my OCD.” This relabeling allows them to get some distance from the content of the obsession and view it in somewhat the same way Buddhists view suffering in meditation: they observe its effects on them and so slightly separate themselves from it. The OCD patient should also remind himself that the reason the attack doesn’t go away immediately is the faulty circuit. Some patients may find it helpful, in the midst of an attack, to look at the pictures of the abnormal OCD brain scan in Schwartz’s book Brain Lock, and compare it with the more normal brain scans that Schwartz’s patients developed with treatment, to remind themselves it is possible to change circuits.

seperate the self from the sickness and then recognize that actions can be taken to mitigate the effects

it. I suggest to my patients that they think of the use-it-or-lose-it principle. Each moment they spend thinking of the symptom—believing that germs are threatening them—they deepen the obsessive circuit. By bypassing it, they are on the road to losing it. With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it.

hobbs/ hebbs axom to desensitize/forget certain disorders that are cause by fixation (OCD).

Emma’s blindness has reorganized her brain and her life. A number of us who were at the dinner are interested in literature, but since she has gone blind, Emma has done more reading than any of us. A computer program from Kurzweil Educational Systems reads books aloud to her in a monotone that pauses for commas, stops for periods, and rises in pitch for questions. This computer voice is so rapid, I cannot make out a single word. But Emma has gradually learned to listen at a faster and faster pace, so she is now reading at about 340 words a minute and is marching through all the great classics. “I get into an author, and I read everything he has ever written, and then I move on to another.” She has read Dostoyevsky (her favorite), Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dickens, Chesterton, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Flaubert, Proust, Stendhal, and many others.

this is actually what im researching. Crazy how that works

Not all phantoms are painful. After Ramachandran published his discoveries, amputees began to seek him out. Several leg amputees reported, with much shame, that when they had sex, they often experienced their orgasms in their phantom legs and feet. One man confessed that because his leg and foot were so much larger than his genitals, the orgasm was “much bigger” than it used to be.

what we learned in class regarding "footgasms"

Ramachandran argued that the claim made perfect neuroscientific sense. The Penfield brain map shows the genitals next to the feet, and since the feet no longer receive input, the genital maps likely invade the foot maps, so when the genitals experience pleasure, so do the phantom feet. Ramachandran began to wonder whether some people’s erotic preoccupation with feet, or foot fetishes, might be due in part to the proximity of feet and genitals on the brain map. Other erotic enigmas fell into place. An Italian physician, Dr. Salvatore Aglioti, reported that some women who have had mastectomies experience sexual excitement when their ears, clavicles, and sternums are stimulated. All three are close to nipples on the brain map. Some men with carcinoma of the penis who have had their penises amputated experience not only phantom penises but phantom erections.

possible fetishes and overly "non-sexual" body part sensitivity

Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body. When you throw your back out, you say, “My back is killing me!” and not, “My pain system is killing me.” But as phantoms show, we don’t need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain. We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps. People with actual limbs don’t usually realize this, because the body images of our limbs are perfectly projected onto our actual limbs, making it impossible to distinguish our body image from our body. “Your own body is a phantom,” says Ramachandran, “one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience.”

the body is an accuracte representation of the self however not for all this was constructed to make sense of stimuli. This also explains the distortion that one may perceive of the body.

Distorted body images are common and demonstrate that there is a difference between the body image and the body itself. Anorexics experience their bodies as fat when they are on the edge of starvation; people with distorted body images, a condition called “body dysmorphic disorder,” can experience a part of the body that is perfectly within the norm as defective. They think their ears, nose, lips, breasts, penis, vagina, or thighs are too large or too small, or just “wrong,” and they feel tremendous shame. Marilyn Monroe experienced herself as having many bodily defects. Such people often seek plastic surgery but still feel misshapen after their operations. What they need instead is “neuroplastic surgery” to change their body image.

an interesting idea for people that believe that may have gender dismorphia.

The team showed that 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.

in sea snails

The first plastic concept Freud developed is the law that neurons that fire together wire together, usually called Hebb’s law, though Freud proposed it in 1888, sixty years before Hebb. Freud stated that when two neurons fire simultaneously, this firing facilitates their ongoing association. Freud emphasized that what linked neurons was their firing together in time, and he called this phenomenon the law of association by simultaneity.

Freud thought of hebbs axom before hebb (60years) law of simultanity

The left hemisphere generally processes the verbal-linguistic elements of speech, as opposed to the emotional-musical ones, and analyzes problems using conscious processing. Babies have a larger right hemisphere, up to the end of the second year, and because the left hemisphere is only beginning its growth spurt, our right hemisphere dominates the brain for the first three years of our lives. Twenty-six-month-olds are complex, “right-brained” emotional creatures but cannot talk about their experiences, a left-brain function. Brain scans show that during the first two years of life, the mother principally communicates nonverbally with her right hemisphere to reach her infant’s right hemisphere.

Born right brain centered

Explicit memory was discovered through observation of the most famous memory case in neuroscience—a young man named H.M., who had had severe epilepsy. To treat it, his doctors cut out a part of his brain the size of the human thumb, the hippocampus. (There are actually two “hippocampi,” one in each hemisphere, and both were removed.) After surgery H.M. at first seemed normal. He recognized his family and could conduct conversations. But it was soon apparent that since his operation, he could not learn any new facts. When his doctors visited him, chatted, left, and then returned again, he had no memory whatsoever of the previous meeting. We learn from H.M.’s case that the hippocampus turns our short-term explicit memories into long-term explicit memories for people, places, and things—the memories to which we have conscious access.

Hipppcampus means of creating long term memory

This doubt was once so widespread that no research was conducted to investigate the matter, but new studies show that infants in the first and second years can store such facts and events, including traumatic ones. While the explicit memory system is not robust in the first few years, research by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and others shows it exists, even in preverbal or barely verbal infants.

infintile amnesia is not complete

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. With instincts turned up and inhibitions turned down, the dreaming brain can reveal impulses that are normally blocked from awareness. Scores of studies show that sleep affects plastic change by allowing us to consolidate learning and memory. When we learn a skill during the day, we will be better at it the next day if we have a good night’s sleep. “Sleeping on a problem” often does make sense.

sleeping is a egitimate study

But there is another possible cause. It has recently been discovered that early childhood trauma causes massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinking it so that new, long-term explicit memories cannot form. Animals removed from their mothers let out desperate cries, then enter a turned-off state—as Spitz’s infants did—and release a stress hormone called “glucocorticoid.” Glucocorticoids kill cells in the hippocampus so that it cannot make the synaptic connections in neural networks that make learning and explicit long-term memory possible. These early stresses predispose these motherless animals to stress-related illness for the rest of their lives. When they undergo long separations, the gene to initiate production of glucocorticoids gets turned on and stays on for extended periods. Trauma in infancy appears to lead to a supersensitization—a plastic alteration—of the brain neurons that regulate glucocorticoids. Recent research in humans shows that adult survivors of childhood abuse also show signs of glucocorticoid supersensitivity lasting into adulthood.

many anxiety laden individuals may suffer this

Depression, high stress, and childhood trauma all release glucocorticoids and kill cells in the hippocampus, leading to memory loss. The longer people are depressed, the smaller their hippocampus gets. The hippocampus of depressed adults who suffered prepubertal childhood trauma is 18 percent smaller than that of depressed adults without childhood trauma—a downside of the plastic brain: we literally lose essential cortical real estate in response to illness.

effects of depression on the hippocampus

Antidepressant medications increase the number of stem cells that become new neurons in the hippocampus. Rats given Prozac for three weeks had a 70 percent increase in the number of cells in their hippocampi. It usually takes three to six weeks for antidepressants to work in humans—perhaps coincidentally, the same amount of time it takes for newly born neurons in the hippocampus to mature, extend their projections, and connect with other neurons. So we may, without knowing it, have been helping people get out of depression by using medications that foster brain plasticity. Since people who improve in psychotherapy also find that their memories improve, it may be that it also stimulates neuronal growth in their hippocampi.

prozac hippocampus growth on neuroplastic principles

To find out if neurogenesis can strengthen mental capacity, Gage’s team has set out to understand how to increase the production of neuronal stem cells. Gage’s colleague Gerd Kempermann raised aging mice in enriched environments, filled with mice toys such as balls, tubes, and running wheels, for only forty-five days. When Kempermann sacrificed the mice and examined their brains, he found they had a 15 percent increase in the volume of their hippocampi and forty thousand new neurons, also a 15 percent increase, compared with mice raised in standard cages. Mice live to about two years. When the team tested older mice raised in the enriched environment for ten months in the second half of their lives, there was a fivefold increase in the number of neurons in the hippocampus. These mice were better at tests of learning, exploration, movement, and other measures of mouse intelligence than those raised in unenriched conditions. They developed new neurons, though not quite as quickly as younger mice, proving that long-term enrichment had an immense effect on promoting neurogenesis in an aging brain.

neurogenesis can be accessed at an older age though not as fast as pre pruning age. continues to be more effeciant in a stimulating enviroment.

Gage’s colleague Henriette van Praag showed that the most effective contributor to increased proliferation of new neurons was the running wheel. After a month on the wheel, the mice had doubled the number of new neurons in the hippocampus. Mice don’t really run on running wheels, Gage told me; it only looks like they do, because the wheel provides so little resistance. Rather, they walk quickly. Gage’s theory is that in a natural setting, long-term fast walking would take the animal into a new, different environment that would require new learning, sparking what he calls “anticipatory proliferation.”

fast walking/ jogging/ running promotes neurogenesis on principle since evolutionarily speaking it would only be done on to experience and not hone (resource managment). It does not nessecitate actual experience (see rats).

That we still have some neurogenesis in old age is not to deny that our brains, like our other organs, gradually decline. But even in the midst of this deterioration, the brain undergoes massive plastic reorganization, possibly to adjust for the brain’s losses. Researchers Mellanie Springer and Cheryl Grady of the University of Toronto have shown that as we age, we tend to perform cognitive activities in different lobes of the brain from those we use when we are young. When Springer and Grady’s young subjects, aged fourteen to thirty years, did a variety of cognitive tests, brain scans showed that they performed them largely in their temporal lobes, on the sides of the head, and that the more education they’d had, the more they used these lobes. Subjects over sixty-five years had a different pattern. Brain scans showed that they performed these same cognitive tasks largely in their frontal lobes, and again, the more education they’d had, the more they used the frontal lobes.

we uses differnet lobes for cognitive tasks pre 65 and post 65 temporal/ frontal respectively..

Another major reorganization of the brain occurs as we age. As we have seen, many brain activities are “lateralized.” Much of speech is a left-hemispheric function, while visual-spatial processing is a right-hemispheric function, a phenomenon called “hemispheric asymmetry.” But recent research by Duke University’s Roberto Cabeza and others shows that some lateralization is lost as we age. Prefrontal activities that took place in one hemisphere now take place in both. While we don’t know for sure why this happens, one theory is that as we age and one of our hemispheres starts to become less effective, the other hemisphere compensates—suggesting that the brain restructures itself in response to its own weaknesses.

less task hemispheric isolation (lateralization) as we age. Likely due to resource effectiveness compensation.

Vaillant concluded that old age is not simply a process of decline and decay, as many younger people think. Older people often develop new skills and are often wiser and more socially adept than they were as younger adults. These elderly people are actually less prone to depression than younger people and usually do not suffer from incapacitating disease until they get their final illness.

older people typically do not suffer from severe illness until thier fatal one? interesting

The woman joking with me across the table was born with only half her brain. Something catastrophic happened while she was in her mother’s womb, though no one knows what for sure. It wasn’t a stroke, because stroke destroys healthy tissue, and Michelle Mack’s left hemisphere simply never developed. Her doctors speculated that her left carotid artery, which supplies blood to the left hemisphere, may have become blocked while Michelle was still a fetus, preventing that hemisphere from forming. At birth the doctors gave her the usual tests and told her mother, Carol, that she was a normal baby. Even today a neurologist would not likely guess, without a brain scan, that a whole hemisphere is missing. I find myself wondering how many others have lived out their lives with half a brain, without themselves or anyone knowing it.

missing an entire hemisphere and living a seemingly normal life.

Grafman wanted to understand what factors most affected recovery from frontal lobe injuries, so he began to examine how a soldier’s health, genetics, social status, and intelligence prior to his injury might predict his chance of recovery. Since everyone in the service has to take the Armed Forces Qualifications Test (roughly equivalent to an IQ test), Grafman could study the relationship of preinjury intelligence to that after recovery. He found that aside from the size of the wounds and the location of the injury, a soldier’s IQ was a very important predictor of how well he would recover his lost brain functions. Having more cognitive ability—intelligence to spare—enabled the brain to respond better to severe trauma. Grafman’s data suggested that highly intelligent soldiers seemed better able to reorganize their cognitive abilities to support the areas that had been injured.

Iq is associated with faster recovery periods.

From his research Grafman has identified four kinds of plasticity. The first is “map expansion,” described above, which occurs largely at the boundaries between brain areas as a result of daily activity. The second is “sensory reassignment,” which occurs when one sense is blocked, as in the blind. When the visual cortex is deprived of its normal inputs, it can receive new inputs from another sense, such as touch. The third is “compensatory masquerade,” which takes advantage of the fact that there’s more than one way for your brain to approach a task. Some people use visual landmarks to get from place to place. Others with “a good sense of direction” have a strong spatial sense, so if they lose their spatial sense in a brain injury, they can fall back on landmarks. Until neuroplasticity was recognized, compensatory masquerade—also called compensation or “alternative strategies,” such as switching people with reading problems to audio tapes—was the chief method used to help children with learning disabilities. The fourth kind of plasticity is “mirror region takeover.” When part of one hemisphere fails, the mirror region in the opposite hemisphere adapts, taking over its mental function as best it can.

Four kinds of plasticity.

Migration of a mental function to the opposite hemisphere can happen because early in development our hemispheres are quite similar, and only later do they gradually specialize. Brain scans of babies in their first year show that they process new sounds in both hemispheres. By age two they usually process these new sounds in the left hemisphere, which has begun to specialize in speech. Grafman wonders whether visual-spatial ability, like language in babies, is initially present in both hemispheres and then inhibited in the left as the brain specializes. In other words, each hemisphere tends to specialize in certain functions but is not hardwired to do so. The age at which we learn a mental skill strongly influences the area in which it gets processed. As infants, we are slowly exposed to the world around us, and as we learn new skills, the most suitable processing sectors of our brains that are as yet uncommitted are the ones used to process those skills.

hemispheric lateralization develops given circumstances rather than hardwired

A dramatic example has been described by Dr. Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has shown that some people who develop frontotemporal lobe dementia in the left side of their brain lose their ability to understand the meaning of words but spontaneously develop unusual artistic, musical, and rhyming skills—skills usually processed in the right temporal and parietal lobes. Artistically, they become particularly good at drawing details. Miller argues that the left hemisphere normally acts like a bully, inhibiting and suppressing the right. As the left hemisphere falters, the right’s uninhibited potential can emerge.

cross hemispheric communication works to communicate ideas while simultaniously normalizing them. Thus when one is stricken the others qualities tend to manifest themselves to the extreme.