The doctor, an American named Michael Moskowitz, now runs – successfully, by Doidge’s account – a revolutionary pain clinic helping those with conditions no amount of analgesics can touch. This practice becomes second nature and then curative. His first chapter details how a man in chronic pain from a crippling neck injury, himself a doctor, methodically teaches his brain to block out pain using visualisation techniques, forcing those “brain areas” that felt pain to “process anything but pain, to weaken his chronic brain circuits”. Apparent miracle follows on apparent miracle. He goes in search of cures and recoveries that either derive from or support that shift in thinking. Hundreds of studies went on to demonstrate that mental activity is not only the product of the brain but the shaper of it.”ĭoidge’s new book takes those findings to the next logical stage. The scientist behind that discovery, Eric Kandel, also showed that learning can ‘switch on’ genes that change neural structure. In 2000, the Nobel prize for medicine was awarded for demonstrating that, as learning occurs, the connections among nerve cells increase. “Equipped,” Doidge wrote, “for the first time, with the tools to observe the living brain’s microscopic activities, neuroplasticians showed that the brain changes as it works. Norman Doidge: ‘You don’t have to believe it but you have to suspend your disbelief and just do it.’ Photograph: Felix Clayĭoidge’s first book, published seven years ago, described how the principle of such healing – of the plastic brain – was becoming established fact in the laboratory through a greater understanding of ways in which circuits of neurons functioned and were created by thought. ![]() A profile he once wrote of the novelist Saul Bellow won the President’s Medal for the best single article published in Canada in the year 2000.He is persuasive and curious as a writer, and rigorous as a thinker, though what he writes about is at the edge of our current understanding of mind and body. ![]() He started out as an award-winning poet and a student of philosophy. Doidge, a Canadian, is a distinguished scientist, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist on the faculty of both the University of Toronto and of Columbia University in New York. Norman Doidge’s two books, The Brain That Changes Itself(more than a million copies sold) and, just published, The Brain’s Way of Healing (which comes complete with that “mind-bending” quote, from the New York Times), present such dilemmas within their own covers. W hen you pick up a bestseller that announces “this book will change your life”, or which, say, claims to be full of “mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff”, what are your first instincts? Do you think “wow!” or “whoa”? In a bookshop, faced with a choice of browsing, do you turn most often toward shelves marked definitively “science” or those labelled provocatively “mind, body, spirit”?
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