Book Review: "The Brain's Way of Healing: Stories of Remarkable Recoveries"

Author: Dr Norman Doidge

I originally read “The Brain's Way of Healing” by Dr Norman Doidge about five years ago now. It was the first book I read about the brain and the Nervous System after I had hit rock bottom, and began to take responsibility for my own health. It remains near the top of my recommended reading list, because of the priceless knowledge it contains about the processes by which “neuroplastic” (or neurological re-wiring) healing occurs.

In particular, for the application to chronic illness and trauma, it proves to us that there are indeed very many possibilities of things we can do or try, right now, beyond the medical or surgical. The book offers several modalities that may have huge potential to reduce our suffering.

In this way, the book restores hope, and, ironically, that restoration of hope is, in itself, part of the neuroplastic healing process, through supporting the neuromodulation and neurorelaxation stages described below. Conversely, the removal of hope, through what is said to us at the point of a diagnosis, leaving people despondent, really exacerbates the noisy brain which is now known to be a root cause of neurodegeneration. So, through providing proof that all is not lost, the reading of this book is a virtuous circle, and indeed can be part of starting a healing (brain detoxification) process.

Here are my notes, taken as annotated excerpts from the book, on the stages of neuroplastic healing,

Neurostimulation

“Neurostimulation helps to revive dormant circuits in the hurt brain, leading a healing process through an improved ability of the noisy brain to regulate and modulate itself. Some forms of stimulation begin from an external source (such as light, sound, vibration), but other forms are internal (thoughts, visualizations).”

The book covers several stories of people recovering through different neurostimulation type therapies, including fast walking, red light, music and sound, electrical stimulation of the tongue, and movement exercise.

Neuromodulation

“Neuromodulation restores the balance between excitation and inhibition in the neural networks and quiets the noisy brain. People with a variety of brain problems can't regulate sensation properly. They are often too sensitive to outside stimulation, or, alternatively insensitive to it. Neuromodulation restores the balance. One way neuromodulation works is by resetting the brain's overall level of arousal by acting on subcortical brain systems, such as the recticular activating system (RAS) of the brainstem, and the autonomic nervous system (ANS)..

Neurorelaxation

“Once stress responses are turned off, the brain can accumulate and store the energy that will be needed for the efforts of recovery, through relaxation and catching up on sleep. Many people with brain problems are exhausted and poor sleepers. Sleep allows waste products and toxic buildups to be discharged from the brain through the cerebral spinal fluid. This helps explain why loss of sleep leads to deterioration in brain function: too much sleep deprivation leads to a toxic brain. The neurorelaxation phase appears to correct this.”

Neurodifferentiation

“In the final phase of healing, the brain is rested, and the noisy brain has been modulated and is much quieter, because the circuits can regulate themselves. The person is able to pay attention again, and is ready for learning, which involves the brain doing what it does best: making fine distinctions or "differentiating", e.g. training to make increasingly subtle distinctions in sounds.”

I will end with a further nugget of wisdom from Dr Doidge's book, which is helpful in that it teaches us not to give up at the first hurdle, because there are no one size fits all solutions to any of this. So it is important to try and try again, to keep exploring the different possibilities for neuroplastic healing, in the spirit of curiosity and play, and seek the optimal solutions which fits us best. In particular, I believe modalities which personally bring us some sense of joy, fun, interest or achievement are likely to be the ones which work for us.

“An individual's progress is never, in this neuroplastic approach, dependent solely on the technique, or the disease or the problem alone. We don't treat disease, we treat people. No two brains are alike, and no two brain problems are identical.”