Doidge gives fascinating insights regarding the neuroplasticity of the brain.
Chapter 1 reports on a case study of a doctor who had an accident that caused intense pain, but he found that the brain can eliminate pain. If you don't move your brain rewards you because pain is a danger signal and there is no danger when you don't move. The use of much morphine prevented his nerves from becoming chronically stimulated and saved hi from developing a chronic pain syndrome.
The brain controls how much pain we feel. When neurons in our pain maps get damaged they fire false alarms that make us feel the pain is in our body. A chronic injury can cause pain maps to expand so we feel pain over a larger area. Pain can expand to adjacent brain maps causing us to feel pain over a larger area of the body. Chronic pain is a more top-down process.
The same brain areas that process pain also perform other functions. If we can perform those other functions the brain won't process pain. Brain maps are dynamic allocating space according to use it or lose it. Moskowitz used visual activity to overpower the pain. He asked patients to imagine that the are of the brain devoted to processing pain was shrinking. He never let a pain spike occur with doing some visualization. It takes time but by six weeks his pain was almost gone. It took a year for him to be almost always pain free. He formulated the MIRROR principle for patients to organize their minds: Motivation, Intention, Relentlessness, Reliability, Opportunity, and Restoration. Patients got pain reduction when they stretched or compressed fingers and a camera magnified the effect.
Chapter 2 tells about a man who overcame the symptoms of Parkinson's disease with an exercise program he devised and a special kind of concentration. Exercise, fast walking, is effective and reduces the risk of dementia.
Chapter 3 covers the stages of neuroplastic healing and the how and why it works.
The Pervasiveness of Learned Nonuse
Put the good arm in a cast otherwise it will take over the functions of the weak arm whcih will
get weaker.
The Noisy Brain and Brain Dysrhythmias
Turning off the sympathetic nervous system improves the signal-to-noise ratio in brain circuits.
Chapter 4 Rewiring the Brain with Light
Chapter 5 Moshe Feldenkrais ... Healing serious brain problems through mental awareness of movement.
The brain cannot think without motor functions. Emotions show. Awareness of movement is key to improving movement. Differentiation -- making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements -- builds brain maps. When a body part is injured its representation in the brain map becomes smaller or disappears. If the stimulus is small then we can detect very small changes. Slowness of movement is the key to awareness and awareness if the key to learning. Reduce the effort whenever possible. Errors cannot be avoided. Let your nervous system decide how to do the movement. Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs.
Chapter 6 A Blind Man Learns to See
William Bates did for vision what Feldenkrais did for movement. He showed that the habitual ways eyes move affect the eyesight. Eye muscles change the shape of the eye allowing change of focus. Movement of the eye is essential to vision.
Chapter 7 A Device That Resets the Brain
The device fit into a shirt pocket. The part that goes into the mouth looks like a stick of chewing gum and rests on the tongue. It has 144 electrodes to turn on the tongue's sensory neurons. When it stimulates the neuroplastic brain it modifies and corrects how the neurons are firing. A singer who had lost his voice to 30 years of MS got it back withing a week. The tongue is one of the most sensitive organs and tongue stimulation activates the whole brain. The team invents exercises to help a person to regain whatever function was lost. The device treats many brain conditions.Yuri believes that the device works by triggering the brain's self-correcting, self-regulating system that allows it to achieve homeostasis. There are no side effects.
Chapter 8 A Bridge of Sound
Singers were singing themselves into deafness; they sang poorly because they heard poorly. If hearing is fixed it can heal the voice. People with good listening skills mostly speak with the right side of the mouth. Most professional singers are right-eared.
Chapter 1 reports on a case study of a doctor who had an accident that caused intense pain, but he found that the brain can eliminate pain. If you don't move your brain rewards you because pain is a danger signal and there is no danger when you don't move. The use of much morphine prevented his nerves from becoming chronically stimulated and saved hi from developing a chronic pain syndrome.
The brain controls how much pain we feel. When neurons in our pain maps get damaged they fire false alarms that make us feel the pain is in our body. A chronic injury can cause pain maps to expand so we feel pain over a larger area. Pain can expand to adjacent brain maps causing us to feel pain over a larger area of the body. Chronic pain is a more top-down process.
The same brain areas that process pain also perform other functions. If we can perform those other functions the brain won't process pain. Brain maps are dynamic allocating space according to use it or lose it. Moskowitz used visual activity to overpower the pain. He asked patients to imagine that the are of the brain devoted to processing pain was shrinking. He never let a pain spike occur with doing some visualization. It takes time but by six weeks his pain was almost gone. It took a year for him to be almost always pain free. He formulated the MIRROR principle for patients to organize their minds: Motivation, Intention, Relentlessness, Reliability, Opportunity, and Restoration. Patients got pain reduction when they stretched or compressed fingers and a camera magnified the effect.
Chapter 2 tells about a man who overcame the symptoms of Parkinson's disease with an exercise program he devised and a special kind of concentration. Exercise, fast walking, is effective and reduces the risk of dementia.
Chapter 3 covers the stages of neuroplastic healing and the how and why it works.
The Pervasiveness of Learned Nonuse
Put the good arm in a cast otherwise it will take over the functions of the weak arm whcih will
get weaker.
The Noisy Brain and Brain Dysrhythmias
Turning off the sympathetic nervous system improves the signal-to-noise ratio in brain circuits.
Chapter 4 Rewiring the Brain with Light
Chapter 5 Moshe Feldenkrais ... Healing serious brain problems through mental awareness of movement.
The brain cannot think without motor functions. Emotions show. Awareness of movement is key to improving movement. Differentiation -- making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements -- builds brain maps. When a body part is injured its representation in the brain map becomes smaller or disappears. If the stimulus is small then we can detect very small changes. Slowness of movement is the key to awareness and awareness if the key to learning. Reduce the effort whenever possible. Errors cannot be avoided. Let your nervous system decide how to do the movement. Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs.
Chapter 6 A Blind Man Learns to See
William Bates did for vision what Feldenkrais did for movement. He showed that the habitual ways eyes move affect the eyesight. Eye muscles change the shape of the eye allowing change of focus. Movement of the eye is essential to vision.
Chapter 7 A Device That Resets the Brain
The device fit into a shirt pocket. The part that goes into the mouth looks like a stick of chewing gum and rests on the tongue. It has 144 electrodes to turn on the tongue's sensory neurons. When it stimulates the neuroplastic brain it modifies and corrects how the neurons are firing. A singer who had lost his voice to 30 years of MS got it back withing a week. The tongue is one of the most sensitive organs and tongue stimulation activates the whole brain. The team invents exercises to help a person to regain whatever function was lost. The device treats many brain conditions.Yuri believes that the device works by triggering the brain's self-correcting, self-regulating system that allows it to achieve homeostasis. There are no side effects.
Chapter 8 A Bridge of Sound
Singers were singing themselves into deafness; they sang poorly because they heard poorly. If hearing is fixed it can heal the voice. People with good listening skills mostly speak with the right side of the mouth. Most professional singers are right-eared.
