Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself.
Credit: Jimlee
When I meet up with Norman Doidge it's at the end of a long day of interviews and he looks exhausted. "Give me a few minutes to get myself together," he says wearily as he ducks up to his hotel room for a few minutes of quiet. He returns with dark chocolate and popcorn, and over coffee he perks up and talks to me about the power of the mind and the best-selling The Brain That Changes Itself.
The literary neuroscience book uses case studies and research to show that our thoughts can change the actual structure and physiology of our brain - a theory known as neuroplasticity. When the book came out in 2007 (2008 in Australia), it revolutionised the way scientists thought about the brain, which researchers have long thought was unchangeable and machine-like.
For a man who has overthrown hundreds of years of neuroscience, Doidge is much more softly spoken than I would imagine. He's calm, attentive and patient and I can't picture him rushing out to crush an established theory. As it turns out, my impression of him is correct, and the events that led up to the publication weren't a rush at all - more a slow build up of mounting evidence that Doidge could no longer avoid.
"On the one hand, the research for the book was five years, and on the other hand it was all of my professional life," says Doidge as he offers me a piece of dark chocolate.
It was worth the time, the book has been hovering on the non-fiction best sellers lists for the past three years and has been reprinted 10 times - something that Doidge still finds surprising. But not quite as surprising as the concept of neuroplasticity itself.
"When I think about it I'm still like 'wow' - I still have to pinch myself. For so long we've been told that when areas are damaged you can't really expect the brain to reorganise itself. And so when I'm asked about whether a condition can be helped, the old reflexes are there ready to be very, very cautious and say, 'No, it's not possible'. But [...] I've seen so many amazing recoveries."
Doidge has captured some of these recoveries in his book and has since made two films on neuroplasticity, one by the same name and Changing Your Mind. Here's what he had to say about science writing, comparisons with The Secret and backlash from his book, during an interview in Sydney, in August 2010.
You've shown that thoughts and exercises can change our brain, how is this helping to treat people with neurological conditions?
There are so many approaches that doctors can take. One example is when a person has a stroke and they lose control of one arm - they'll try to use the affected arm but it doesn't work, so the brain learns not to use it and that brain area wastes away. But if we put the good arm in a sling or cast so they can't use it, then that bad arm is used incrementally. Scans show that by doing this, neighbouring tissue in the brain takes over moving the bad arm.
