The Brain That Changes Itself

The Brain That Changes Itself

Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

Norman Doidge

Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words.

Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain-power unfamiliar to us now.

The idea that the brain is like a muscle that grows with exercise is not just a metaphor.

Competitive plasticity also explains why our bad habits are so difficult to break or “unlearn.” Most of us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in it. When we try to break a bad habit, we think the solution is to put something new into the container. But when we learn a bad habit, it takes over a brain map, and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of that map and prevents the use of that space for “good” habits. That is why “unlearning” is often a lot harder than learning, and why early childhood education is so important— it’s best to get it right early, before the “bad habit” gets a competitive advantage.

When the brain unlearns associations and disconnects neurons, another chemical process occurs, called “long-term depression,” or LTD. Unlearning and weakening connections between neurons is just as plastic a process, and just as important, as learning and strengthening them. If we only strengthened connections, our neuronal networks would get saturated. Evidence suggests that unlearning existing memories

Buddhists view suffering in meditation: they observe its effects on them and so slightly separate themselves from it.

Our “immaterial” thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won’t someday be explained in physical terms. While we have yet to understand exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is now clear that they do.

The idea Freud inherited from his teachers was that events we experience can leave permanent memory traces in our minds. But when he started working with patients, he observed that memories are not written down once, or “engraved,” to remain unchanged forever but can be altered by subsequent events and retranscribed. Freud observed that events could take on an altered meaning for patients years after they occurred, and that patients then altered their memories of those events.

To be changed, Freud argued, memories had to be conscious and become the focus of our conscious attention.

Scores of studies show that sleep affects plastic change by allowing us to consolidate learning and memory. When we learn a skill during the day, we will be better at it the next day if we have a good night’s sleep. “Sleeping on a problem” often does make sense.

It is not just “highly cultured” activities that rewire the brain. Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations.

Even leisure activities change our brain; meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

Sometimes individual identities can be changed in adulthood, even against a person’s will. Human beings can be broken down and then develop, or at least “add on,” neurocognitive structures, if their daily lives can be totally controlled, and they can be conditioned by reward and severe punishment and subjected to massed practice, where they are forced to repeat or mentally rehearse various ideological statements.

In some cases, this process can actually lead them to “unlearn” their pre-existing mental structures, as Walter Freeman has observed. These unpleasant outcomes would not be possible if the adult brain were not plastic.

Almost all neuroscientists, as Merlin Donald writes, had a view of the brain as an isolated organ, almost as though it were contained in a box, and they believed that “the mind exists and develops entirely in the head, and that its basic structure is a biological given.” The behaviorists and many biologists championed this view.

Among those who rejected it were developmental psychologists, because they have generally been sensitive to how outside influences might harm brain development.

Television watching, one of the signature activities of our culture, correlates with brain problems. A recent study of more than twenty-six hundred toddlers shows that early exposure to television between the ages of one and three correlates with problems paying attention and controlling impulses later in childhood.

About twenty years after the spread of TV, teachers of young children began to notice that their students had become more restless and had increasing difficulty paying attention. The educator Jane Healy documented these changes in her book Endangered Minds, speculating they were the product of plastic changes in the children’s brains. When those children entered college, professors complained of having to “dumb down” their courses each new year, for students who were increasingly interested in “sound bites” and intimidated by reading of any length.

Meanwhile, the problem was buried by “grade inflation” and accelerated by pushes for “computers in every classroom,” which aimed to increase the RAM and gigabytes in the class computers rather than the attention spans and memories of the students. The Harvard psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, an expert on attention deficit disorder (ADD), which is genetic, has linked the electronic media to the rise of attention deficit traits, which are not genetic, in much of the population. Ian H. Robertson and Redmond O’Connell have had promising results using brain exercises to treat attention deficit disorder, and if that can be done, we have reason to hope that mere traits can be treated as well.

Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. But Marshall McLuhan, was the first to intuit that the media change our brains irrespective of content, and he famously said, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan was arguing that each medium reorganizes our mind and brain in its own unique way and that the consequences of these reorganizations are far more significant than the effects of the content or “message.”

Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message. They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them. As Just put it, “The brain constructs the message… differently for reading and listening. The pragmatic implication is that the medium is part of the message. Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper.”

Michael and Just’s experiment shows that each medium creates a different sensory and semantic experience— and, we might add, develops different circuits in the brain.

Each medium leads to a change in the balance of our individual senses, increasing some at the expense of others. According to McLuhan, preliterate man lived with a “natural” balance of hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. The written word moved preliterate man from a world of sound to a visual world, by switching from speech to reading; type and the printing press hastened that process.

Now the electronic media are bringing sound back and, in some ways, restoring the original balance. Each new medium creates a unique form of awareness, in which some senses are “stepped up” and others “stepped down.” McLuhan said, “The ratio among our senses is altered.”

We know from Pascual-Leone’s work with blindfolded people (stepping down sight) how quickly sensory reorganizations can take place.

To say that a cultural medium, such as television, radio, or the Internet, alters the balance of senses does not prove it is harmful. Much of the harm from television and other electronic media, such as music videos and computer games, comes from their effect on attention. Children and teenagers who sit in front of fighting games are engaged in massed practice and are incrementally rewarded. Video games, like Internet porn, meet all the conditions for plastic brain map changes.

A team at the Hammersmith Hospital in London designed a typical video game in which a tank commander shoots the enemy and dodges enemy fire. The experiment showed that dopamine— the reward neurotransmitter, also triggered by addictive drugs— is released in the brain during these games. People who are addicted to computer games show all the signs of other addictions: cravings when they stop, neglect of other activities, euphoria when on the computer, and a tendency to deny or minimize their actual involvement.

Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media. It is the form of the television medium— cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises— that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the “orienting response,” which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings.

The orientation response evolved, no doubt, because our forebears were both predators and prey and needed to react to situations that could be dangerous or could provide sudden opportunities for such things as food or sex, or simply to novel situations. The response is physiological: the heart rate decreases for four to six seconds.

Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can’t keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend. Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orienting responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.

No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV. Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring. The cost is that such activities as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures become more difficult.

All electronic devices rewire the brain. People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand or dictate, because their brains are not wired to translate thoughts into cursive writing or speech at high speed. As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.

Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and thus easily linked. Both involve the instantaneous transmission of electric signals to make linkages. Because our nervous system is plastic, it can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. Indeed, it is the nature of such systems to merge whether they are biological or man-made.

The nervous system is an internal medium, communicating messages from one area of the body to another, and it evolved to do, for multicelled organisms such as ourselves, what the electronic media do for humanity— connect disparate parts.

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” Space and time are abolished because electronic media link faraway places instantaneously, giving rise to what he called the “global village.” This extension is possible because our plastic nervous system can integrate itself with an electronic system.

We must be careful clinically too, as we speak of brain plasticity, not to fall into blaming those who, despite this new science, cannot benefit or change. Clearly neuroplasticity teaches that the brain is more malleable than some have thought, but to move from calling it malleable to calling it perfectible raises expectations to a dangerous level.

The plastic paradox teaches that neuroplasticity can also be responsible for many rigid behaviors, and even some pathologies, along with all the potential flexibility that is within us.

As the idea of plasticity becomes the focus of human attention in our time, we would be wise to remember that it is a phenomenon that produces effects we think of as both bad and good— rigidity and flexibility, vulnerability, and an unexpected resourcefulness.

SEVEN IDENTITIES

Identity is a constantly changing and expanding manifestation of spirit. Without it, our power is too diffuse, but if we cling to it, we become limited. If our rights remain intact, or if we have managed to reclaim them, then we have a good chance at embracing our seven basic chakra identities, each of which builds upon the one below in an ever-expanding pattern of larger systems.

Before listing the identities, it is worthwhile to reflect on the concept of identity itself, for it is a slippery but important concept in both psychology and spirituality. Identity gives us meaning. We are constantly in search of meaning, for it tells us how to operate. By identifying rain clouds, we know to roll up the windows in the car. If we are ill or out of sorts, we want to identify the cause.

Each of the chakras is associated with a particular identity that emerges developmentally as we mature through life. Each identity contains within it the identities of the previous stages. Expanding our sense of identity is one of the keys to expanding our mode of consciousness from one chakra to the next. The identities can be seen as metaphoric layers of clothing, as ways to cover the essential soul underneath. It is not a problem to have clothing—we need different outfits for different occasions, from jeans to tuxedos to sexy lingerie. It is a problem if we think the clothing is who we actually are, and never remove it.

When we are so immersed in these identities that we confuse them with the underlying Self, then we have gotten stuck at a particular level. We have confused the clothing for the body itself—unwilling to remove it, scared to expose the nakedness underneath. If, on the other hand, we cannot identify at all with a level, then we know we have some work to do there. Job hunting in dirty jeans or gardening in formal wear is inappropriate—if that is all we can do, we are severely limited.

The chakra identities can be positive or negative, liberating or imprisoning. They are simultaneously real and false. They are real in that they are real parts, yet they are false because they are not the whole.

CHAKRA ONE: Our first identity level is known as the physical identity, and its job is self-preservation. Here we learn to identify with the body—when my body is hungry, I am hungry, when it hurts, I hurt. The body cloaks the invisible soul, and reveals its shape and expression. When we identify with the body, we identify with the soul’s expression in physical form, as well as its physical qualities of male, female, young, old, fat, thin, healthy, or sick.

Physical identification is necessary for dealing with the physical world. If I don’t realize that I cannot lift one hundred pounds of paper in a carton, I can seriously hurt my back. If I don’t recognize when I’m hungry or need to rest, I can seriously compromise my health over time. To go without this identity is to be dissociated from the body and disconnected from the physical world.

CHAKRA TWO: Beneath the surface of the body churn the emotions. The emotions are the clothing of our feelings. When we experience a strong emotion, we feel our aliveness and often identify with the feeling involved. Even our language makes this identification: I am angry, I am scared. (Other languages say, I have fear or anger.) This is the identity that says, I feel therefore I am, and whatever I feel is what I am. Some people identify their main sense of self in this way.

The second chakra, then, is our emotional identity, and its job is self-gratification. Emotion emerges from our physical identity and yet brings in an added dimension. We have to feel our bodies in order to feel our emotions and learn to interpret their messages. Emotional identity expands the experience of the body and gives it dimension and texture, connecting us to the flow of the world.

CHAKRA THREE: In the third chakra, we identify with our will, behavior, and our actions. This is where we realize that we are a separate entity with the power to choose our own actions and consequences. This is the ego identity, oriented towards self-definition.6 This type of identification says, “I am what I do.” When we do something right or achieve something difficult, we feel good about ourselves. When we make mistakes or fail, then we think we’re bad. We think that what we do is a statement of who we are. Ego identity emerges from physical and emotional identity and can be thought of as the inner executive, as it executes our intentions. This is the identity most often in charge. But we have to remember—it is only a middle manager.

CHAKRA FOUR: In the fourth chakra, we create a social identity, also known as the persona. The persona is the personality created to interact with others—it is the part of ourselves that the ego allows to rise above the surface, separated off from the shadow. Our social identity may be the compulsive helper, the seductive lover, the pleaser, or the entertainer. In our families we may take on the role of the lost child, the hero, the good girl, or the rebel. Initially, our self-concept is based on how others react to us—whether we are popular or an outcast, admired or criticized, loved or rejected—identifying ourselves primarily through our relationships. As we mature, the identity shifts to include how we perceive our role of service to others, or how we have learned to give and embrace a world beyond our ego-oriented self. This becomes our basis for self-acceptance.

The social identity has the ego as its base, yet continually expands beyond the realm of self-centered needs to embrace an awareness of others. As I transcend my ego identity to care more about others, my social identity emerges. Yet, how I present myself to others depends a great deal on underlying ego strength.

CHAKRA FIVE: The fifth chakra is the center of our creative identity. Here we identify with our self-expression—what we say and produce. Initially, we identify with our word through the commitments we make. I have committed myself in marriage and by that commitment I am a wife. I have given my word to write a book, and in that commitment I am a writer. In this identity, we take responsibility for what we say by embodying it in our actions. Through our creativity, we identify ourselves as artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, politicians, mothers, or fathers. (We may also identify with our mistakes and failures.) The creative identity expands outward, through its ability to contribute and give back to the larger system.

As this level matures, we begin to identify with larger possibilities and reach for inspiration from the great works of civilization, from the inspiring acts of heroes and saints, poets and painters. As we expand into the creative flux of the world around us, we identify with our path. Our path is the realization of our personal contribution to the larger system. Ideally, the path leads to an ever-expanding growth of consciousness and an eventual transcendence of the personal self into the transpersonal self. Its foundation is a healthy ego, social confidence, and a sense of compassion for others.

CHAKRA SIX: In the sixth chakra, we expand into our archetypal identity, transforming the individual I into something transpersonal. Our personal story is now seen as an event in a larger story. If we suffered from poor mothering because our mothers were not supported, we carry a piece of the archetypal story of the degradation of the Mother Goddess—the loss of the archetypal Mother. The power that our mothers lacked was the same power that has been stripped from women over millennia, stripped from the archetype itself. Those who suffered from distant fathers carry a piece of the larger story of industrial revolution, of disempowered men removed from their families, and the distant Father-God archetype.

We enlarge our understanding of Self as we find our own life themes reflected in fairy tales, mythology, movies, and news stories. We experience self-reflection in the larger system. We realize we are players in a much larger drama, riding the waves of the cultural tide’s ebb and flow. As we mature at this level, we consciously embrace the evolution of the archetypal symbols that speak to us. If we take on a crusade for the preservation of the ancient forests, we are doing more than just saving trees—we contribute to a larger archetypal cause.

CHAKRA SEVEN: In the crown chakra, we come to the final and largest identity: our universal identity. The more our consciousness expands, the larger our identity can become. As we realize the magnificent scope of the cosmos, we have the opportunity to transcend our smaller, more limited world, and identify with the entire universe. This is a common theme in mystical experiences where the identification with the smaller ego states gives way to recognition of a unitary identity with all of life, indeed of all creation. In Eastern philosophy, this is the basis of true self-knowledge—the knowledge of divinity within.

The chakra levels move from exclusively individual identities—as unique and singular as our bodies—toward a universal commonality. At the outer extreme of the crown chakra, individuality is transcended and absorbed in the larger field of the divine. This is expressed by the Buddhist maxim: Thou Art That. The purpose of the crown chakra, meditation, and indeed, of most spiritual disciplines, is to break through the bonding with the smaller identities and to achieve realization of the universal identity. This does not deny the reality of the smaller identities; it just means that we see them as part of a unified and integrated whole.

Each identity is primary when our developmental process is centered there. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we must consolidate our identities on the lower levels before we can sustain the larger identities, even though we may catch glimpses of them from time to time quite out of order. As we experience the higher, more inclusive identities, our lower identities slide into appropriate perspective—no less important, yet taking their place as pieces supporting a much larger, more powerful whole.

Judith Anodea. Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self 

Mindfulness as Secular Meditation

AW: In this video Sam Harris focuses on meditation as secular meditation. There is an urgent need of separating Meditation practices from religious rituals or from religion itself. Meditation should be taught in schools and colleges along with secular subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics etc. Meditation deals specifically with understanding the nature of mind. It has little to do with faith in God or lack of it or any other religious matter.

Transcript

Sam Harris: Mindfulness is very much in vogue at this moment as many of you probably know. And it’s often taught as though it were a glorified version of an executive stress ball. It’s a tool you want in your tool kit. It prepares you emotionally to go into a new experience with a positive attitude and you know you’re not hauling around baggage from the past. And that’s true.

Actually having focus and having your mind in the present moment is a little bit of a superpower in situations that we’re all in from day to day. But that actually undervalues what mindfulness really is and its true potential. It’s more like the large hadron collider in that it’s a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind.

And one of these discoveries is that the sense of self that we all carry around from day to day is an illusion. And cutting through that illusion I think is actually more important than stress reduction or any of the other conventional benefits that are accurately ascribed to mindfulness.

The enemy of mindfulness and really of any meditation practice is being lost in thought, is to be thinking without knowing that you’re thinking.

Now the problem is not thoughts themselves. We need to think. We need to think to do almost anything that makes us human – to reason, to plan, to have social relationships, to do science. Thinking is indispensable to us but most of us spend every moment of our waking lives thinking without knowing that we’re thinking. And this automaticity is a kind of scrim thrown over at the present moment through which we view everything. And it’s distorting of our lives. It’s distorting of our emotions. It engineers our unhappiness in every moment because most of what we think is quite unpleasant.

We’re judging ourselves, we’re judging others, we’re worrying about the future, we’re regretting the past, we’re at war with our experience in subtle or coarse ways. And much of this self-talk is unpleasant and diminishing our happiness in every moment. And so meditation is a tool for cutting through that.

It’s interrupting this continuous conversation we’re having with ourselves. So that is – that in and of itself is beneficial. But there are features of our experience that we don’t notice when we’re lost in thought.

So, for instance, every experience you’ve ever had, every emotion, the anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn’t here anymore. It arises and it passes away. And if it comes back in the present moment by virtue of your thinking about it again, it will subside again when you’re no longer thinking about it.

Now this is something that people tend not to notice because we rather than merely feel an emotion like anger, we spend our time thinking of all the reasons why we have every right to be angry. And so the conversation keeps this emotion in play for much, much longer than its natural half-life.

And if you’re able, through mindfulness to interrupt this conversation and simply witness the feeling of anger as it arises you’ll find that you can’t be angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you think you can be angry for a day or even an hour without continually manufacturing this emotion by thinking without knowing that you’re thinking, you’re mistaken.

And this is something you can just witness for yourself. This is – again this is an objective truth claim about the nature of subjective experience. And it’s testable. And mindfulness is the tool that you would use to test it.

One problem is that most of the people who teach mindfulness – and I know many of the great vipassana teachers in the West and in the East and I have immense respect for these people. I learned to meditate in a traditionally Buddhist context. But most people who teach mindfulness are still in the religion business. They’re still – they’re propagating Western Buddhism or American Buddhism.

The connection to the tradition of Buddhism in particular is explicit and I think there are problems with that because when you, if you are declaring yourself a Buddhist you are part of the problem of religious sectarianism that has needlessly shattered our world. And I think we have to get out of the religion business.

That whatever is true about mindfulness and meditation and any introspective methodology that will deliver truths about the nature of consciousness is non-sectarian. It’s no more Buddhist than physics is Christian. You know the Christians invented physics or discovered physics but anyone talking about Christian physics clearly doesn’t understand the significance of what we’ve understood through that means. It’s the same with meditation.

There’s going to come a time where we no longer are tempted to talk about Buddhist meditation as opposed to any other form. We’re just talking about turning consciousness upon itself and what can be discovered by that process.

Now it just so happens that Buddhism almost uniquely has given us a language and a methodology to do this in a way that is really well designed for export to secular culture because you can get to the core truths of Buddhism, the truth of selflessness, the ceaseless impermanence of mental phenomenon, the intrinsic unsatisfactoriness of experience because you can’t hold on to anything.

No matter how pleasant an experience is it arises and then passes away. And no matter how much you protect yourself, unpleasant experience is destined to come. These features of our minds can be fully tested and understood without believing anything on insufficient evidence.

So it’s true to say that despite all of the spooky metaphysics and unjustified claims within Buddhism you can get to the core of it without any faith claim and without being intellectually dishonest.

But it is intellectually dishonest, I think, to keep talking about these truths in an exclusively Buddhist context because it’s misleading. It subtly gives the message that in order to have rich, meaningful, important spiritual lives we must somehow continue to endorse religious sectarianism. We must still frame this inquiry with an ancient allegiance to one accidental strand of human culture as opposed to using all of the concepts and tools and conversations that are available to us in the twenty-first century.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton