Dr. Norman Doidge | The Power of Thought

This idea of ​​speaking to the brain in its own language is new, it is cutting-edge. I mean, I'm writing about very cutting-edge stuff. Canadian brain researcher Dr. Norman Doge is breaking new ground again. His first book explained the theory of neuroplasticity. discovery that the brain can change now in new book, says he has found evidence that the brain can be rewired to help treat people with everything from Parkinson's disease to autism, and is challenging the medical community to be more supportive of these new approaches I sat down with. I visited earlier this week, but first some background.

For years, the brain has been described as a machine. I learned that the brain was quite programmed and that what you have at 18 years old remains with you and, if it is damaged, little repair could be done. I was operating from that model which is that this is a broken brain and it is irreparably broken. Dr. Norman Doy is part of a growing sector of mainstream scientific research that turns that thinking on its head. I am here today to describe what I have come to believe is the most important change in our understanding of the human brain in 400 years.

It is the revolutionary theory of neuroplasticity that the brain can repair itself and even rewire itself. The discovery of neuroplasticity is the discovery that our brains can change their structure and function through mental processes. With only experience, he tells the stories of how people with chronic pain, stroke, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, ADHD or some types of blindness, have seen radical improvements through focused thinking and brain training. movement, new parts of the brain to replace damaged ones. written all about this in his new book, The Brain Way of Healing, we met earlier this week in Toronto, this is a very interesting book, thank you, you talk about a case, uh, another doctor who had experienced many years of chronic neck pain, yes, and he was able to heal himself by flooding his brain, explain that, uh, Dr.

Michael Mosquit was a psychiatrist who became a pain specialist. He had the following

thought

, you know, I've been teaching my residents that there are these switches in the brain that can turn off pain. so it's not the neck that really hurts, it's the brain sending a signal that your neck hurts, yeah I mean it's the whole system, but there are doors that go from the body to the brain and if you can stop the signal, then and if you can stop the signal, that's what the anesthetic does and the medications also make you stop the signal and you can do it through a

thought

process.

He was able to do that in this situation and since then he has worked with several patients, many patients and I wrote about him in his first patient, but I saw many of his patients and many of them completely came off the medications, some still have very , very damaged, but curiously they can be free of pain. The next chapter is about a companion. in South Africa with Parkinson's who gave up some of his symptoms, yes, John Pepper had his first early symptoms of Parkinson's when he was 30, instead of losing mobility, he became more mobile, he learned on his own, he became more mobile, which with what he called his conscience. technique for walking and I what to walk consciously, just be aware that you are not going to start walking but you are going to lift, you know, lift your right leg, move it forward at the knee, move your weight towards the right foot.

So by doing that, he was creating, yes, he was developing a different part of his brain, yes, he was using that part of his brain to move, but the second part is key and it turns out that walking is really important for the brain. You know that only in anatomy textbooks are the brain and the body separated, in reality the brain is perfectly connected to the body and we know that when animals walk and when people walk they generate two things that are really crucial for brain health of any human being. They generate brain growth factors of various types that strengthen connections between nerve cells when we learn or practice a skill and actually generate some new cells in a small part of the brain involved in memory.

What is so wonderful about this story? People say, well, maybe it's a one-off, well, it's not a one-off. We have major studies coming out now from The Mao Clinic and many other sources that show that walking programs, movement programs, and exercise programs significantly decrease movement problems. in Parkinson's patients and also improves their mood and yet he was a big problem in the Parkinson's community and they kicked him out for giving people false hope, yes he was actually the head of the patient group and some people. They saw him move, they weren't his neurologists, they had never examined him, but you know people who are caught up in this idea that the brain is fixed, the pre-neuroplastic view that its circuits were formed and finalized in childhood.

I call it the doctrine of the immutable brain. because it is like a doctrine, it is an abstract concept. I have a lot of difficulty accepting that activity of various kinds, mental and physical, could actually clinically alter the structure of the brain. Many people suffer from autism, ADHD, it is quite common these days. You say that? The theory can be applied there too, as new research shows that children with autism have inflammation throughout their bodies. Autism is not just a disease of the brain, it is a disease of the whole body, so it affects the brain and then the inflamed brain of autistic children is very common for it to be inflamed, it is very poorly connected.

Now you may have noticed that autistic children often cover their ears, they find loud sounds, certain types of sounds, very, very unpleasant and are very sensitive to them, and when you walk into a room, it's very unpleasant. It is usually very loud and then you can concentrate on several conversations and that is because the ear has an Auditory Zoom like the zoom lens of a camera and that Auditory Zoom does not work in many autistic children and therefore what they hear. It's not the higher frequencies of human speech, but the low sounds of predators, the kind of thing you hear when you see jaws and you know that low dull sound, so it's possible to use music that's been modified to train that sound. auditory. zoom and the brain circuits involved with that, have you seen kids helped with this, yeah, what kind of difference does it make?

A child who had moderate to severe autism and who basically had no language, was not communicating at all. There is no temporary eye contact with his parents Q. He has tantrums all the time. His parents were told that they would put him in an institution and they were heartbroken because they had no relationship with him, but that was the hardest part after he slept during the first week of treatment. The first time, the parents were able to remember that he admired his mother after the first or second treatment. The second day he hugged his father for the first time spontaneously.

I mean, so why doesn't everyone do this? Why not? Don't all parents with autistic children come in? Why don't we live in a medical utopia where cutting-edge treatments are translated? Why don't all doctors recommend this? So I think people are too under the influence of the idea that autism is simply genetic rather than a genetic interaction with the environment. Two, the study showing the underlying autism connection in the autistic brain, are all very recent. Three, this idea of ​​talking to the brain in its own language, it's new, it's cutting edge, I mean. I'm writing about very innovative things, so it takes a while for these things to be implemented and there are still people who were educated the way it was.

To believe that the brain is programmed, you say that the mind can alter. the brain where the mind is is not in the brain no one knows for sure i think you will often see people saying you know you are your neurons or your thoughts people tell me that all the time you know your thoughts, you know this is your someone will hold a brain at the beginning of a documentary this is your brain you know uh everything about you your thoughts your feelings and so on are here in your neurons that's not true my opinion on reading uh My opinion on literature is that most neuroscientists they believe that the mind is distributed very diffusely throughout the brain and some people might argue even more than that, maybe in part you know we have 100 million neurons in our gut, you know people talk about gut sensations.

So your mind could be down here, if you did research, you take a person and you make them listen to music and you put them in a brain scanner and you look at their brain, you'll see certain areas light up and then you'll say this is where we process music, but If you put their entire body through a brain scan, I've often wondered what you would see lighting up, what other neurons you would see lighting up because they are part of the system. I also think that the mind will emerge as a kind of at least a distributed Pro process and you know, those are deep philosophical questions.

Is the Mind simply what the brain does? Are they interacting? Is the brain tuned to thinking? the brain, um, just produces all or part of it, it's tuning in because our senses are tuning in to energy and patterns all the time. I don't think these questions have really been resolved, which makes the feeling very interesting. It has really been a pleasure. talk to you thank you