On Neuroplasticity

I did quite a lot today. It was a full day, and a good day. I went to the Aquarium and the Zoo, and took (according to my app) 19,213 steps. But that's not what I want to talk about.

In the evening I went to a lecture (? seminar?) by Dr Norman Doidge on neuroplasticity. Doidge is the author of two bestselling books - The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain's Way of Healing.

For a start, I think that he does need to be a little bit more careful with his language. There were several aspects in which my skeptic friends would have winced. For example, he talked about using energy to heal the brain. There are certain segments of the population who, if they stopped there, would have come away with entirely the wrong impression. Those on the newage and spiritualist side of the fence would have felt that he was validating their favourite alternative healing modalities, while those on the skeptical side would have felt that he was validating the favourite alternative healing modalities of the other side. But he was in fact doing neither.

As I said, to get that impression you had to stop where he mentioned energy. Those who continued to listen to him speak would have heard him talk about how electrochemical energy in the brain is transformed into sound energy by the speaker's mouth and vocal chords, which is then picked up by the microphone, transformed back into electrical energy, then back into sound energy by the auditorium speakers, and finally transformed back into electrochemical energy in the ears and brain of the listener. None of which is rubbish.

He described one of his case studies in which an autistic boy was helped by listening to a certain kind of music. Again, if you'd stopped there you would have come away with entirely the wrong impression. What he was actually doing was using music that was filtered in certain specific ways to teach the boy to better filter his inputs so that they weren't so overwhelming. This was an example of using energy - sound energy in this case - to "heal" the brain. Or rather, demonstrate sustained improvement in the boy's engagement with others of his family.

His use of the word "healing" has a tendency to raise skeptical red flags, but in fact it is a perfectly cromulent word that has been appropriated by the newage crowd to describe what basically amounts to wishful thinking. But in effect the brain does heal itself. A major part of his lecture consisted of describing how the old outdated way of thinking about the brain - as a static organ that never changes or undergoes repair - is very slowly being replaced in clinical settings with the neuroplastic model.

Unfortunately at the end he went off the rails a little bit, when he answered an audience member's question about the technique of tapping. Regardless, it was a very interesting lecture, and his critique of the traditional view of the brain was pretty much spot on. But it was fairly clear where a large segment of the audience of some 700 people were coming from.

It was a good evening. I'm glad I went.

A large part of his books consists of case studies, which Oliver Sacks demonstrated is a great way of selling books. The danger is in the audience coming to the conclusion that the case studies are the science, rather than being simply data points.