![]() Far more than once dreamed possible, the brain can-if not always cure-heal itself.ĭoidge wrote about the brain’s remarkable ability to recalibrate itself-what doctors call neuroplasticity-in his 2007 bestseller The Brain That Changes Itself. ![]() The brain is actually a supple, malleable organ, as ready to unlearn as it is to learn, capable of transforming vicious circles into virtuous circles, of resetting and repairing its internal communications. That concept no longer stands up to scrutiny. The prevailing 20th-century view was that it was too specialized for its own good-a fixed machine made up of discrete parts that can break down, never to function again. Those individuals, and thousands like them, achieved those results, writes Norman Doidge, a Toronto psychiatrist and author of The Brain’s Way of Healing, precisely because the human brain is a generalist par excellence. And in California, a psychiatrist and pain specialist rids himself of 13 years of chronic pain within a year, without drugs or surgery, through his brain’s own efforts. A Broadway singer, silenced for 30 years by multiple sclerosis, recovers his voice. ![]() ![]() A South African man with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that often leaves its sufferers immobile, walks his symptoms into submission. ![]()
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