Customer Reviews:
 A book that every educator should read August 5, 2010
Denis Pinsonnault
As easy to read as a novel. Nevertheless, it allows everyone to understand that teaching is much more than a transfer of contents.
The brain that changes itself March 17, 2010
booloo (Canada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have a son who had a stroke at 46 and he found this book most helpful. I would highly recommend it be put into hospitals and waiting rooms.
 this is an excellent book December 21, 2009
Susand E. Cavanagh
I found The Brain That Changes Itself to be a fascinating read. Norman Doige made many claims relating to brain plasticity and backed them all up with research. The book is written in a clear and accessible language. I have recommended this book to many of my colleagues and friends.
Great science, great writing December 2, 2009
Cilantro (Ottawa, ON Canada)
I really enjoyed this book. It was really well written and easy to follow, and the experiments and research that the author describes are absolutely fascinating. It's definitely worth a look if you're into psychology or biology at all! Or even if you just think research about the brain is cool. :)
The Brain That Can - And You Can Too November 20, 2009
D. C. Reid (Canada)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
6. The Brain that Changes Itself - Norman Doidge
This is an excellent book for the general reader of the new concept of neuro-plasticity. Doidge is a doctor and worked with Paul Bach-y-Rita, the scientist who brought this subject on stream since the 1970s when every other neurobiologist thought he was a nutbar. That was because the view was that once a brain was formed, it could not change. If you had a stroke, head injury, or eye damage, tough, you were stuck with it for the rest of your life.
Baccy-Rita found out differently. His own father, a professor, had a large stroke and could not get himself on or off the toilet, could not crawl, could not lift his arm. But with much ongoing work of doing things like learning how to crawl again, then to stand without falling over, and so on, he ultimately regained his abilities, including speaking and typing, to be a professor for many years, and go mountain climbing, where he died on a holiday.
The concept of brain plasticity means that if you can give stimulation to one sense for another sense, that the brain changes itself to process the new information and also connect with the areas that require responding to the world, like walking or talking, and the damage is ultimately repaired. For example, a woman who was given too much antibiotics in an infection in a hospital lost her sense of balance so badly that she could not stand up, lost her job, lost everything. She was treated by Bachy-Rita in the following way: a hat with gyroscopes and vision devices was put on her head and then the leads were attached to a small paddle that she placed on her tongue. The small electrical discharges to her tongue were taken up into her head to compensate for her ruined vestibular system (our balance centre in our inner ears), made connection with the visual cortex and the parietal body command centres and ultimately she got to the point where she only had to put the hat on for a few minutes every four months. I have grossly simplified this one example of dozens in the book.
In another example, this has been made into a documentary, that I have seen on PBS and CBC: a blind man was given a vision hat and the tongue paddle. In the end he was able to navigate his way around a room, and, 'see' and pick up a ball from the floor, spot a garbage can across the room and toss it into it. I don't think I could do this, and I've got sight.
Plasticity, like the left brain right brain concept, is currently being dumbed down into psycho babble on many tv shows. This book gives you a much better introduction to the concept and is definitely worth looking at for anyone who wants to understand how the brain can be trained to use another area to provide a function. Many products have been made using these concepts. Space suits are so thick that people can't feel nuts and bolts in their fingers. Gloves with sensors on the outside connected to the inside make this possible. Men who have lost the ability to ejaculate have been provided with a sensory condom that takes the friction information to another area of skin that then gets taken to the brain and processed so that sexual pleasure is enjoyed and ejaculation happens once again. Tests have shown promise for dealing with the tremor of Parkinsons' it's a very useful concept of wide application. If you have a brain 'misfunction', you should read this book. The problem is not your brain, the problem is that no one has devised a rehabilitation program that you can follow to get the functions back.
And for a Brave New World concept, read page 84 for descriptions of how, in future, we will be able to turn our learn easy centre (nucleus basalis) on with yet to be developed drugs and learn anything with the ease we did in childhood. It will be for us the Matrix response to the question: Can you fly this thing? Answer: Not yet. And then you get loaded.
Do focus on chapter 4 that is about love, sex, parenting changing our attractions, losing a love, grieving and learning to love another. All are plasticity events whereby certain brain chemicals (for ex, oxytocin and vasopressin) allow us to unlearn old loves and form new attractions, but at the same time change sexual attraction into love. It also has an excellent section on sexual fantasies, how they arise, stimulate us, and when knowing their origin, change can begin. You will be able to look at your own mind with new light, a common association is sex and violence, and this chapter will give you some insight into yourself. I lost my children through divorce 15 years ago, and this chapter has a good explanation of how one begins to feel less pain by making small steps away over the years, or how, for instance, a new love can shield you from the necessary grieving over the loss of children. Its still there, waiting to be faced and let go.
Chapter 7 has a fascinating section on pain in phantom limbs. Using a mirror box that projected a limb for an amputated limb, VS Ramachandran, was able to have patients lose pain from the limb they didnt have and to unfreeze limbs that had been in slings or casts before amputation. This means that pain is in the brain, not the body, and that the entire body is really just a phantom the brain has constructed for its own use. This means that with the correct mind stimulus that a person could become anything they wanted to be, including a rocket scientist, or a better rocket scientist.
dcreid.ca - more to come...
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