Norman Doidge: Brain's Healing Energies

for a very long time scientists thought the brain was an organ beyond treatment if something went wrong or if one was born with a deficit the conclusion was tough luck not so anymore there are revolutionary techniques that can lead to radical improvements in chronic pain stroke various forms of brain damage Parkinson's disease multiple sclerosis autism attention deficit disorder learning disorders sensory processing disorder developmental delays Down syndrome and even some forms of blindness here now to tell us how this is all possible dr. Norman Doidge he's the author of the best-selling book the brains way of healing remarkable discoveries and recoveries from the frontiers of neuroplasticity and it's always good to have you in that chair back here at TV Oh before we talk about the new book because you were here I guess a few years ago with the brain that changes itself so let's just remind everybody the sort of key breakthrough idea of that book before we talk about your new one sure that was basically the discovery that the brain is not fixed it's not like a hardwired machine but the way it works is by changing its wiring and the word that describes that property is neuroplasticity and neuroplasticity means that the brain's structure and function can be changed by our activity what we do and by mental experience it doesn't mean we can change everything about the brain but it means we can change a lot more about about it than we thought if neuroplasticity was the kind of buzzword of that first book what's the one word of this book that sums it up I'd say there are two words I'd say one of them is energy using energy to facilitate neuroplastic change and the second word is healing for really for a hundred years doctors very rarely used the term the turn the words healing and brain in the same sentence and now I think it's it's warranted healing comes from the eighth the ancient or the old English word anyway Halon which means not only to cure but to restore and make whole again and I there are about a hundred stories in this book about people who have restored lost functions and we are going to go through some of them the language of the brain are packets of energy there's that word energy again what does that mean that's in your book sure there are two in fact there are two languages of the brain one of if you will and that's a metaphor or simile one of them has to do with chemical signaling we've heard a lot about chemicals chemicals are released between brain cells very locally the chemicals we've heard about are things like serotonin and dopamine on what people don't often appreciate is some of those chemicals like dopamine work in certain parts of the brain very important in certain parts of the brain less important in other parts so if there is a chemical language of the brain it's like a dialect it's local but the lingua franca of the brain the language spoken throughout has to do with the patterns of electrical discharge the patterns of information contained in the various forms of electrical activity in the brain and you call that energy well it is energy it is energy okay it's energy and not in some flaky sense it's it's measurable energy there are equations that go with it yes let's you alluded to the fact earlier that you've got a lot of stories in this book and I'd like to go through some of them with you because I I think as people hear them they are going to well some of these are just downright shocking the healing power of energy one of the patients in your book is Gabriel Pollard you wrote of Gabriel Pollard in the book this woman's brain was rewired with light what was the problem she had that needed rewiring she had a light she had a life-threatening brain tumor Gabrielle did and it was removed it saved her life but it left her with various kinds of symptoms that are you have when you have a kind of a brain trauma so she was hyper sensitive to sound she was had terrible balance problems she couldn't multitask she was exhausted all day long she was nauseated all the time she couldn't see things that were in front of front of her memory was completely shot and she had some rehab she made very very modest progress but she was still quite disabled how old a woman would you be oh I think she must have been in her late 30s when this originally happened maybe early for not sure anyway several years passed funnily enough she and I attended a lecture at the entero Medical Association there's a group of us who meet and look at some far-out things and it was on light and a doctor Fred Cohn was there who's was a surgeon who done 20,000 operations had a shoulder problem he didn't want to get surgery on it because it wouldn't work and it was healed with low intensity lasers low intensity lasers basically aren't like the hot lasers that you see in James Bond when he's about to Goldfinger's cutting in half they heal they decrease inflammation or they move inflammation along its normal path they decrease pain can you see that that laser uh when it's emitting its beam well you wouldn't want to look you wouldn't want to look into a laser but you can see light coming off other kinds of light that do healing anyway but to make a long story short Kahn originally used lasers to heal people with neck problems but he had a man who had had a stroke and he put the thing the laser on the back of his neck and the stroke had affected his ability to see it was like he was always looking through a keyhole very very narrow and even though he was being treated for the neck he noticed that suddenly after you know a long long time post stroke he was looking through a keyhole because his visual fields were blown out it started to expand so Cahn realized with from that and other things that you could treat concussions and brain traumas anyway Gabrielle went off and got some treatment with Kahn and I bumped into her funnily enough at the least likely places to bump into her which was a a Beethoven concert this was a woman who couldn't stand the sound of two people talking at once and this woman who could you know was walking so tentatively when I first saw her after it was just several months later was well on the way to being recovered and you know now she's just in great shape this is after years of being stuck and concentrated a lot of concussion so this is a new treatment for traumatic brain injury you tell us there is evidence Alzheimer's disease might also be treated with these lasers what not to treated also what the well the that is very preliminary evidence the so I wouldn't I wouldn't make that claim yet what I would say is that's the realm of promising what I just described there are a number of people who've already been helped from traumatic brain injury it turns out that all lasers in animal studies are diminishing the proteins that build up in Alzheimer's disease the really good news for Alzheimer's is prevention you know there's a study that came out a year ago that was done by a really fine group it's the Cochran Institute it's physicians who are listening though that they're sort of like the gold standard and assessing studies and what they showed is that they followed almost 2300 men in in in Wales for 30 years doing healthy things like exercise not smoking not drinking normal weight eating fruits and vegetables and they reduced they reduce their risk of developing dementia of Alzheimer's kind or vascular dementia by a staggering 60 percent sixty percent and part of it was just sort of walked three kilometres a day right yeah and the the issue here is that's neuroplastic that the exercise was the strongest intervention when as I've said before here on this show when we walk when animals walk it's usually because they're fleeing a current environment that's short on food or there's a new predator and they're going to an unexplored territory and the brain responds to that exertion by releasing growth factors that consolidate connections between neurons and it also releases some new cells in the part of the brain that is the first to go in Alzheimer's so I know we expect these extraordinary results to come from high-tech things or drugs if any drug reduced the risk of dementia by sixty percent it would be talked the most talked about news everywhere in it yeah so could I walk light in the light in the light yes here's another name dr. Michael Moskowitz how did he contribute to our understanding of the brains way of healing itself mosk Moskowitz was a psychiatrist and who turned pain physician and he had two important life lessons about pain he's kind of a Huck finished character and when he was in middle age he climbed up before a fourth of July parade on a tank in San Rafael California and fell off and heard three popping sounds and it was the sound of his femur breaking the longest bone in the body and he was lying on the ground if the ambulance didn't arrive in time he would die because his thigh was the size of his waist as he bled into it he was ten at a ten pain that's the way pain physicians measure pain and but he discovered that if he didn't move for a full minute that pain went down to a zero and he said my goodness you know I've taught my students this all the time the gait theory of pain that there are switches in the spinal cord and brain that can turn pain off but now I really believe it when Reagan was shot he didn't show signs of pain and he said after he was shot you know I was shot many times in the movies and I always acted as though it hurts but now I discover it doesn't always hurt that's because the brain has these switches so Moskowitz was deeply deeply moved by this visceral experience of a brain switch for pain then he got in trouble in another way he was a waterskiing in quotes on an inflated tube with his daughters he flipped over and hurt his neck and he developed pain and acute pain in a small area but it kept pressing on a nerve and it became chronic now acute pain is basically the body is injured somewhere a limb is injured and it's the brain is saying don't move that you could cause further injury in chronic pain what happens is the brain gets better and better at perceiving pain because the brain is plastic and just as you can improve your ability to enjoy music when you go to the Opera and differentiate different voices in the chorus so - pain can be can become hypersensitive if you keep pressing on that nerve chronic pain has plasticity gone wild in the brain it's an injury to the brain not just to the body he was about eight out of ten disabled by his chronic pain syndrome for years around this time plasticity was being discovered and he realized plasticity was fundamentally that chronic pain was a plasticity problem he read about 15,000 pages on the subject and because he was an experienced pain physician he knew the following it's not the case that there's just one pain center in the brain that you know if you put an electrode in there you'll you'll feel pain there about a dozen such centers and interestingly most of those centers are dual purpose centers they do a couple of things so for instance you may have noticed when you're in pain that you might be a little cranky and that's because one of the paint the areas of process pain processes emotional regulation and pain and other areas praval ving an attention in pain so he thought he would find he thought he would do this he knew that when you go from acute pain to chronic pain those maps are hijacked by pain and about 20% of the other activity has taken over to process pain so he resolved that whenever he had the slightest attack of pain what he would do is he would do another one of those activities to try to rescue it that part of the brain map from pain he chose to visualize because there are two areas in the brain that process imagery and paint every time he got an attack of pain he visualized it didn't matter what he visualized it didn't matter but he chose to do the following thing he chose to visualize three different brain scans the brain when it's not in pain the brain in acute pain when those dozen areas have like little pinpricks lighting up and the brain and chronic pain where those pin pricks become like supernovas and imagined winding it back it wasn't wishful thinking all that mattered as he was visualizing something but doing this kept him reminded him that there are these switches in the brain after a couple of weeks he knows the few seconds free of pain a couple of months you know extended minutes free of pain by the end of the year this this physician who had been on every medication tried every complementary technique was now completely off medication and completely pain-free and so he's been doing a lot of this with other patients and now teaching other physicians this in fact on the issue of pain you got an email just the other day I gathered from a woman pi just in yeah an hour an hour ago okay what'd she have to say I mean I'm not saying this happens all the time but she had had a tooth removed and then had pain in an adjacent tooth and it gone for two years it was called a post-traumatic neuralgia she'd seen many many many dentists and physician multiple times on pain medication nothing was working she went to have the tooth removed to get rid of it and her dentist basically said you got to read this book and so she went and she started to cry thinking what's the point you know I'll be pinned I'll have pain for the rest of my life that night she started to apply the techniques in the next morning she woke up and she said I don't have pain in my tooth she couldn't believe it and then she kept applying it and with the right patient matched to the right technique you can sometimes get remarkable results using this mental technique in her case or in Moskowitz's case is it a permanent solution the pain does not come ever you can still Moskowitz has a patient I described Jan Sandin and she her her entire back was was destroyed and she did this and it went away occasionally we would get she would get relapses or Moskowitz occasionally would get a relapse he just applied the technique but if you looked at an x-ray of Jan sandins back it still is devastated as it ever was it's just there's no chronic pain syndrome anymore let's say I'm going to sort of rush you a little bit through these because I want to make sure we get to all the stories that we do want to raise here Moshe Feldenkrais am I saying that name right yeah okay how's his work changed our perception of what the brain can do well Moshe Feldenkrais was a physicist major nuclear physicist who damaged his knee and began to analyze the role of of of movement in pain and awareness of movement in pain and he was one of the first people in the West based on his experience with actually as a judo black belt to understand that mind brain and body are part of the same system and people may have heard of his work it's a form of bodywork that's often used for aching backs and necks but Feldenkrais understood something very very important of public he was one of the first understand that the brain is plastic and to realize that you could use movement and awareness of movement to talk to the brain so look neuroscientists very frequently talk as though you are your brain I'm sure you've heard people say that everything that's important about using the brain we talk about the brain as though the body is really infrastructure to support the brain but in fact that's backwards the the brain evolved long after bodies did to support bodies and they're part of the same system only in anatomy texts are text books are they separate so let's take something with stroke you know a person has a stroke as a stroke and they can't move their foot we discovered in the 19th century in in in many different ways that that stroke is caused by a brain problem so we've tried to concentrate our focus I'm coming up with ID ways to quote treat the brain Feldenkrais understood the body and brain are intimately connected and so he developed ways of very very gently moving the body to awaken dormant circus and get the person aware of it and he's made absolutely extraordinary extraordinary progress since then helping people with stroke his student he's deceased now I described but I do describe a case he worked with a woman missing a third of her brain doing these who was supposed to be institutionalized doing these little tiny movements to wake up the dormant circuitry and develop new circuitry this next example I want you to talk about is a guy you didn't have to go very far to find your neighbor Paul module oh my gosh yeah Paul module is a national treasure Paul medel was born with very severe dyslexia any I think he failed for grades in a row and at one point he was basically not allowed to repeat anymore grades and he went off to a monastery in France where he happened to bump into a man named Alfred Tomatis Alfred Tomatis was an ENT doctor ear nose and throat doctor who had made some huge discoveries about basically about energy in the brain he basically discovered that you can use sound and sound frequencies to talk to the brain remember I said that you know the brains language is patterns of electrical information but a number of our senses basically translate energy and information from the outside world to electrical information sound waves are translated by the cochlea in the ear into electrical waves and the patterns of those ways can be translated into electrical waves and what to Madison was able to do was to fiddle with frequencies fiddle with timing of using music that was modified to help people with dyslexia attention deficit disorder even on the autistic spectrum and basically was able to help Paul who was had many many problems with dyslexia get completely better and Paul completely better yes yes so he reads my mealy now he went to the Sorbonne and graduated in psychology after basically I think was about a year and a half something like that with two mattes and opened up the listening Center with two mattes in Toronto I mean it's an extraordinary extraordinary place and I've just seen I followed 24 about 24 patients over about five years and I followed them quite closely and the overwhelming majority of them made really significant improvements can you do anything for autism yes what can you do submit that you know in the in the world of autism we saved and that one autistic child you've met one autistic child meaning that their memory but it's different everyone's different but there are certain commonalities many of the children with autism you may have noticed often cover their ears they're very distressed and hypersensitive to sounds and there but you know autistic children often have trouble relating people often say it's as though they don't have a concept of other minds they have many many problems including lots of inflammation throughout their bodies we've recently discovered that that inflammation extends to their brains and it affects the connections in the brain including connections between the auditory cortex and the pleasure centers of the brain now autistic kids suffers hypersensitive sounds we believe now because they don't have something most people have there have a circuit in the brain and ear that most people have which is an auditory zoom when you go to a party that's a noisy party at first you can't make out any conversations and then gradually over time you zoom in on one or the other conversation filter out all the other yes you can zoom in particularly on the frequencies of human speech but autistic kids can't do that and they're left with actually very low Quincy's and that sounds really weird like I've just been possessed and you know when you go to movies and someone's possessed they do a voice like that or if you see jaws and the shark comes on it's a really low frequency and it just goes right through all of us and that's because the sounds that our predators make are often low frequencies and so human beings go into a fight flight reaction when they're exposed to those while it's why they're used in the movies and so basically the training is to train on the circuit for the auditory Zoom for autistic kids and like one kid I described Timothy at the end of the first day of the training get his first good night's sleep in years he was supposed to be institutionalized his mother says no and you know he's in the car in the way home his mother says he's different two days later he hugs his father for the first time so what's happening is you lower the hypersensitivities the fight/flight reaction that's always on because they're they're hearing these predatory sounds Goes Down and also they can't develop language because of the frequency problem now there's more to autism than that I think it's a whole body problem and Timothy also benefited from going on a gluten-free diet and I think he was also off dairy as I recall another kid Jordan had the same problems was supposed to be institutionalized and I mean as far as anyone can tell he has no traces of autism left period he went to Dalhousie he's very very good with people he's witty he's he's empathic there's literally no signs in him you know there are some of us who were following cases of autistic kids who have gotten better and are trying to reverse-engineer how that happened this particular book gets personal for you in a way as well because your editor did he not have a stroke while you were in the midst of working on this together yeah half halfway through the book Jim Silberman had a stroke he was on a blood thinner and he had a bleed in his brain it was very very serious got one of these awful calls that starts off after I hadn't heard from I'd actually given him the chapter on light to edit it and he had just finished it and his wife called me up and said you know Norman I want you to know that Jim's okay which meant something happened something bad happened and he was still alive and he had lost the ability to move you know on one side of his body and you know was touch-and-go because it was a bleeds are really really scary if you know can you stop the bleeding and so on luckily he got good conventional emergency care right away but he was left with these terrible deficits and he got mainstream you know his neurologist said look you know as people often say you know you're not going to improve past the first you know six months and it'll be meager anyway it was the most I can't ironic thing in the world because he was one of the first lay people to be interested in brain plasticity and he added in my first book and we just marched through the chapters and we applied these techniques in the first couple of days in the hospital he had a laser light up through his nose to help his brain heal we did felt he did the Feldenkrais technique daily he went down to tout the tab therapy technique Fred Cana in from Toronto made sure that he got light therapy so I mean there's a chapter on a device called the pons and he did that I was I know well I just want to say one thing about Jim is I wanted to do a bit more because but he refused to because he wanted to finish the book because he thought it was important but I can tell you that we know within a couple of weeks of finishing the book he went down to the towel clinic in Alabama and he took his first steps so he's on the way back yeah he's doing very well let me ask you one more thing and that is that ever ever since you got on this journey which has what a million copies sold the first book I mean you've had astonishing success but I wonder if also what comes with that a lot of people in this world now I presume come to you and say I'm in trouble you need to help me solve my problems how do you deal with being the receiver of so many people's hopes and these are people who are of course facing down some of the worst things they'll ever experience in the course of their lives I mean it's a huge challenge after the first book it became very intense it's it's a hell of a burden I I try when I can but it's overwhelming at this point to direct them to the people whose work on describing my role here as I see it is to be an integrative neuroplasticity figure out you know what's most likely to be helpful for you know look I've got five new approaches to traumatic brain injury in this book and what I tried to do is set up stages of healing to determine who would benefit from which which approach but these are early days I'm but I'm doing my best to try to give order to to this field that's where I think I can make my best contribution and we're always grateful when you can find the time to come in here and tell our viewers about it dr. Norman Doidge the brains way of healing remarkable discoveries and boy are they ever and recoveries from the frontiers of neuroplasticity great seeing again thanks so much thanks Support Ontario's public television donate at t v-- org

Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 119,745

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, brain, neuroscience, psychology, health research

Id: ifYcE4-eI_s

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2015