The Brain That Changes Itself

At +Ralph Mazza's suggestion I recently read The Brain That Changes Itself, which sings a paean to the wonders of modern neuroscience, and in particular neural plasticity, which would seem to offer, say, someone who had a stroke, cause for optimism.

To get the bad out of the way, I didn't like at all the chapters that were thin on science, or relied to much on the author's experience as a psychoanalyst. The conclusions may be accurate, but the chapter on Internet porn came across to me like the author banging a well-worn sensationalist drum of titillation and puritanical propriety. Also, I haven't waded through the annotations, which seem to take up half the eBook, since reading is a bit slower at the moment, and I couldn't be bothered at the time. I still have them to read at my leisure, though.

Other than that, I thought it was an excellent book whose implications matched my personal experience very well. For example, the first chapter described a woman who--due to a poorly prescribed antibiotic and an almost total loss of vestibular function--had had the sensation of falling for five years, even suffering the same sensation when she had already fallen over. Miserable. The chapter describes how she was successfully treated using principles of neural plasticity.

Using the ideas in the first chapter (but lacking expensive equipment) I derived a way to experiment upon myself, potentially improving my own poor balance; it could do little harm. It worked. My balance improved noticeably. Score one for the principles the author was describing.

As I read more, it became clearer that everything I knew about neurology from high school (my A-level Biology 20-odd years ago) was wrong, or at best an inaccurate approximation. The implication for me is evident: recovery is not only possible, but attainable; it takes time and hard work, it will often be boring. My relative youth and the quite small amount of lost brain matter are an advantage. I suspect that never learning to drive will also help.

Yesterday, I was asked to speak as the "expert patient" or graduate of the ASPIRE program I mentioned in an earlier post and I found that I was unable to be as coddling as some medics seem to be. Sure it's horrible having a stroke, and sure it's tough, and for sure sometimes there's so much damage that recovery is going to take decades at best, if it's possible at all, but given all that we have a conscious choice to make, and we should be damn sure we make that choice consciously: Do I want to sit in an armchair and fester for the rest of my life, or do I want to get better? If the answer is "get better" then we do the hard work. 

The book lays out some of the principles and, I think, gives a pretty coherent and sensible view of how our neural matter really works, why localization made sense at the time, and most importantly for me, some ideas about how best to use those principles to effect a faster recovery. As an example, I now go to the gym quite a bit, and I was already concentrating on form over apparent brute strength, but understanding more about plasticity has meant that I pay more attention to my right leg while cycling, for example.

Another example that cuts to the heart of the recovery vs rehab dilemma, is that it matters when my left hand compensates for my right hand. Early on, I was compensating enormously and didn't know it, which partly accounts for my wildly over-optimistic expectations of how long it would take to recover. Now, I work hard to notice when my left hand has quietly assumed an automatic task that my right hand should be doing, and force myself to use my right. Even though it's often much slower. When I pay attention to forcing my right hand to do the things it used to, it improves. Any other improvement is as good as accidental.

If you've read the book and have thoughts or questions or whatever about chapters in it, let's talk about it! (Except the internet one. Can't be bothered. Not relevant to me.)

(Originally posted on Google+ with some commentary.)