Had a meltdown? There’s hope!
Great news. Your brain is plastic. Forget everything you’ve been told about it dying off, seizing up, shedding gray matter. Not true. Turns out your brain can˜remap’ itself – it’s that resilient. If one area of the brain is damaged, (providing there is some living tissue left) your noggin just starts rerouting traffic. Tiny engineers set up cones, little road workers with flags send thoughts barreling down different neuronal pathways, new roads are built, and life is good again… eventually.
It isn’t immediate. Road building takes awhile. The joy is, with each passing decade there’s more and more proof that old notions of dying brains due to age or stroke may be coming obsolete.
So goes the wisdom reviewed in a great book by Norman Doidge, MD. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books)
The medical community calls it neuroplasticity. We’ve heard about this before, but Doidge makes it understandable and very readable. Never mind some of those hard-to-grasp notions in The Secret, this is the real deal: Doidge reveals a study where patients with chronic pain can control it with their thoughts, essentially remapping pain centers and rerouting traffic off the rocky road to a much more serene path.
If you or someone you love has had brain trauma or if you just had waaay too much fun in the 60′s, this is definitely a keeper for the bookshelf.
Keep smilin’ and keep those neurons firin’,
Beth
