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Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

by Begley, Sharon (2007)

Reviewed by Carol Lee Flinders, 2008 published in Network Review No 97

The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., is a splendid introduction to the field of neuroplasticity. In the equally readable Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, scientific writer Sharon Begley covers much of the same ground; yet her emphasis is significantly different in certain regards, as are the implications she draws. While the two books overlap, I rarely found myself skimming. The picture of the human brain that emerges here is too radically new, and too astounding, to absorb in just one pass anyway, and as we recognise the differences between the two books, we also grasp how young the field itself is - how plastic, in fact, and open to interpretation.

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, and a researcher, but just as important for this particular undertaking, he knows how to tell a story:

'The woman joking with me across the table was born with only half her brain . . .'

Doidge ushers us into this extraordinary field by degrees, one revelatory finding at a time. Early on, he disabuses us of the one thing most of us think we know about the brain - auditory centre is here, the visual centre there, etc. Dr. Paul Bach y Rita, a pioneer neuroplastician, has demonstrated that the brain is not machine-like after all, and that specific mental functions are not hardwired into a particular location. The mechanistic model made sense in a time when our only insights into the brain's workings derived from accidents that damaged a specific location and resulted in predictable disabilities. Now, though, it is clear that regions of the brain that have been dedicated to one sense can be - have been - re-trained to serve another. The auditory cortex can reorganise itself to have the structure of the visual cortex. Our sense receptors translate different kinds of energy from the external world into electrical patterns sent down our nerves. These patterns are the universal language 'spoken' inside the brain. 'We see with our brains,' Bach y Rita explains, 'not our eyes.'

'Nature has given us a brain,' Doidge observes, 'that survives in a changing world by changing itself.' He employs the term 'cortical real estate,' and asks us to understand that 'use it or lose it' is the law of the land in question. We can 'lose it' in the sense that a massive 'pruning back' operation begins in the brain in adolescence, during which synaptic connections and neurons that haven't been used much simply switch off. But we can also lose it in a much more interesting sense that has to do with the topography of the brain. If we stop exercising mental skills, 'the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practise instead.'

Plasticity is competitive: brain maps allocate brain-processing power, which is a precious resource As Doidge puts it, felicitously, 'There is an endless war of nerves going on inside each of our brains.' An ongoing war requires continuous recruitment: another fundamental principle of neuroscience is, 'Nerves that fire together wire together.' Each time we repeat a behaviour, its control of the brain map strengthens. This is why bad habits are so hard to unlearn, but it's also the reason why deliberately repeated mental exercises can relieve afflictions like the 'brain lock' involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The applications of neuroplasticity, and the implications, appear to be almost boundless. Northern California's Michael Merzenich, regarded as the world's leading researcher on brain plasticity, claims that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia. His research demonstrates that the brain's plasticity doesn't vanish with youth - that radical improvements in cognitive functioning are possible even in the elderly.

Other pioneers in the field include psychologist Ernest Taub, whose 'constraint-induced movement therapy' has revolutionised the way stroke victims are rehabilitated; neurologist V.S.Ramachandran, whose 'mirror box' has cracked the mystery of phantom limbs and the chronic, excruciating pain they can cause; and Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who first mapped the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation, and determined that 'from a neuro-scientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound,' an insight which would lead to the development of the first machines that actually 'read' people's thoughts. A key discovery in the work of Michael Merzenich is that lasting changes in brain maps only occur when the subject is paying close attention. For Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, that insight is of tremendous importance because it underscores the very natural connections she and many of her subjects believe exist between Buddhism and neuroscience. 'Neuro­plasticity occurs only when the mind is in a particular mental state,' she writes, 'one marked by attention and focus. The mind matters. The question was, what power does it have over the brain.'

Now this is language - and implies a conceptual framework - that are both utterly foreign to Doidge. I don't believe the word 'mind' comes up anywhere in his book (whose title, we'll recall, speaks only of a brain that changes itself!). I know it doesn't when he is describing the groundbreaking new approach neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz has developed for treating OCD, though Schwartz himself concludes from that work, according to Begley, that 'the mind can change the brain.' Schwartz describes the therapy in question as an application of 'mindfulness practice;' Doidge does not, and while he does use the word 'mysticism' once, it is as a pejorative. The word 'meditation,' which for many of us might seem relevant to discussions of a brain that changes itself 'from the inside,' is also a no-show.

Not to belabour the point, but these two gifted writers do diverge in rather fundamental ways. As a psycho­therapist, Doidge is particularly gratified by the extent to which he believes neuroplasticity validates psychoanalysis. He reports delightedly that Freud anticipated the finding that 'cells that fire together wire together.' Begley does not identify herself as a Buddhist, but her book arises out of the 2004 Mind and Life Institute conference at Dharamsala, where a handful of prominent neuroplasticians met with the Dalai Lama for one week, taking turns to explain their research to him. The moderator was Richard Davidson, who has studied the brains of Buddhist contemplatives in his lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The tremendous contribution of Begley's book is to raise forcibly the possibility that the real pioneers in neuroplasticity may be men and women who have been investigating the brain from the inside in meditation, following instructions recorded in ancient texts and passed down for thousands of years in an unbroken lineage of spiritual practitioners. Throughout her extremely lucid explanation of the fundamentals of the field (and she covers the same 'basics' that Doidge does), Begley pauses regularly to offer intriguingly parallel insights drawn from Buddhist tradition and interpreted by contemporary Buddhists including the Dalai Lama.

If you were to read just one book on neuroplasticity . . .? It would be a real pity.

Carol Lee Flinders, Ph.D, Northern
California, is author of 'Enduring
Grace: Living Portraits of Seven
Women Mystics,' and 'Enduring Lives'