A woman with damage to the inner ear’s vestibular system, where the sense of balance resides, feels as if she is in constant free fall, tumbling through space like an ocean bather pulled under by the surf. Doidge notes, not only for individual patients with neurologic disease but for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history.Īnd all this from the fact that the electronic circuits in a small lump of grayish tissue are perfectly accessible, it turns out, to any passing handyman with the right tools.įor patients with brain injury, the revolution brings only good news, as Dr. Their work is indeed mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff, with implications, as Dr. Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and award-winning science writer, recounts the accomplishments of the “neuroplasticians,” as he calls the neuroscientists involved in these new studies, with breathless reverence.
Constantly oozing in various directions, it is apparently able to respond to injury with striking functional reorganization, and can at times actually think itself into a new anatomic configuration, in a kind of word-made-flesh outcome far more characteristic of Lourdes than the National Institutes of Health. Now sophisticated experimental techniques suggest the brain is more like a Disney-esque animated sea creature. Every part had a specific purpose, none could be replaced or repaired, and the machine was destined to tick in unchanging rhythm until its gears corroded with age. In classical neuroscience, the adult brain was considered an immutable machine, as wonderfully precise as a clock in a locked case. The credo of this revolution is neuroplasticity - the discovery that the human brain is as malleable as a lump of wet clay not only in infancy, as scientists have long known, but well into hoary old age.
But Norman Doidge’s fascinating synopsis of the current revolution in neuroscience straddles this gap: the age-old distinction between the brain and the mind is crumbling fast as the power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility. In bookstores, the science aisle generally lies well away from the self-help section, with hard reality on one set of shelves and wishful thinking on the other.
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