Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself

This week, I received an email asking me what books had changed my life. Social pressures aside (should I say Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities when I mean Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt?), some books effect such seismic shifts in knowledge that they easily stand up as life-changing. Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself is such a book. While reading it, I had to reluctantly let go of what I’d though were established facts about how the brain works. Two examples, if you will.

Established Fact #1: Each brain function is processed in a particular, predetermined location.

Having the dilettante’s grasp of psychological principles, I was pretty sure that it was possible to map the brain according to which parts did what. For example, the left part of our brain is verbal and the right part is where our visual and spatial abilities always reside. Right?

Well, no. Doidge visits a twenty-nine year old woman, Michelle, who was born with only the right hemisphere of her brain intact. But she is, as Doidge puts it, ‘a demonstration that … half a brain does not make for half a mind.’ Michelle can read, carry out conversations and pray – because her right hemisphere has compensated for the missing part.

Established Fact #2: Brain cells die at astounding rates and cannot be replenished.

We’ve all had older and wiser people warn that we’d better use it or lose it, and there’s probably no older nor wiser than Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who in 1913 declared that adult brain nerve paths die and are never regenerated.

But several studies that show that animals form new brain cells – ‘neurogenesis’ – through exercise and mental activity. Californian researcher Frederick Gage suggests that this is because ‘in a natural setting, long-term fast walking would take [an] animal into a new, different environment that would require new learning’.

These are heady discoveries, and there are more to be had in The Brain That Changes Itself. The book is a delight, due to Doidge’s ability to combine painstaking research with a keen narrative sensibility. The personalities found in this book – whether that of someone who is a prime example of the brain’s fascinating plasticity, or a scientist who has radically changed the way we understand the brain – are as vivid as the science is interesting.

Life-changing, brain-changing … what more could you want?

Norman Doidge will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He is one of the eight writers who will discuss what it means to be human in our Keynote Address #1: Eight Ways to Be Human. In The Brain That Changes Itself: Judge for Yourself, see footage of people with ‘incurable’ conditions, who underwent neuroplastic change. He will also appear in conversation with Perminder Sachdev, author of The Yipping Tiger, to discuss The Amazing Brain.