The Brain That Changes Itself

This book explains the science of neuro-plasticity through interviews and personal stories about injury and recovery. For years, the doctrine of neuroscientists has been that the brain is a machine: break a part and you lose that function permanently. But more and more evidence is turning up to show that the brain can rewire itself, even in the face of catastrophic trauma: essentially, the functions of the brain can be strengthened just like a weak muscle.

Scientists have taught a woman with damaged inner ears, who for five years had had "a sense of perpetual falling," to regain her sense of balance with a sensor on her tongue -- and a stroke victim to recover the ability to walk although 97% of the nerves from the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed. With detailed case studies reminiscent of Oliver Sachs, combined with extensive interviews with lead researchers, Dr. Norman Doidge, a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Columbia University and the University of Toronto, slowly turns everything we thought we knew about the brain upside down.

Table of Contents:

A woman perpetually falling

Building herself a better brain

Redesigning the brain

Acquiring tastes and loves

Midnight resurrection

Brain lock unlocked

Pain

Imagination

Turning our ghosts into ancestors

Rejuvenation

More than the sum of her parts

● Softcover, 448 pages

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