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First Posted on September 3, 2010 by alisonball
Having just spent last Monday listening to Dr. Norman Doidge give a series of lectures on the plasticity of the brain, I have been reinvigorated with this line of thinking. Dr. Doidge and other neuroscientists have been coming much more regularly to Australia since Allan Schore first came in 1999. Dr. Doidge is most particularly interested in the scientific evidence regarding the plasticity of the brain. He is also interested in how psychotherapy works and its relationship to neuroplasticity.
Our brains can continue to change even into very old age. We are not doomed to have only the death of our neurones after we pass the age of 25! People can change, minds can grow and change in many ways including through the psychotherapy process. Long held emotional blocks and patterns of behaviour that have prohibited forming good relationships and living a fulfilling life can change. Psychotherapists have always known this but now we have the proof. Of course if it had not always been so, then psychologists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and many others in the helping professions would have been out of a job long ago.
Dr. Doidge was very reaffirming of the work of Sigmund Freud and early psychoanalysis. He believes that Freud was onto something when he saw his patients for six days every week. He calls it “immersion learning”. Making real change to the neural connections in the brain takes time and really concentrated and consistent effort. Speaking of the neuronal connections in the brain, Dr.Doidge sums up the critical concepts in a few pithy phrases: “Neurones that fire together, wire together”; “neurones that fire apart, wire apart” and “neurones out of synch. fail to link”. He also makes much use of the reality of the notion – “use it or lose it”- whatever we reinforce in our brains takes up space and leaves less space for other connections and pathways.
Those phrases are worth remembering when we fill our minds with negative thoughts about ourselves. We have to work at building useful neuronal connections in our brains.
Of particular interest to us as psychotherapists are his words about the ways in which plasticity works- especially with those who have suffered adult onset trauma or long term relational trauma. He first makes the point that when any neuronal circuit is reactivated it is then open to change. And then, because psychotherapy can offer an environment that is safe, early or previously dormant pathways in the brain can be unmasked. They may perhaps be pathways that were once present before the trauma and these can be opened up to give new possibilities for living in the present. And while these old pathways can be enlivened or changed, psychotherapy can also begin to create new pathways; new ways to think, feel or behave.
If you want to read more about these ideas, Dr. Doidge’s book “The Brain That Changes Itself” is extremely readable. I also noted that on Page 8 of the Melbourne AGE newspaper today (September 3rd 2010) is a story of the use now in rehabilitation of a technique for dealing with “complex regional pain syndrome”- ways of tricking the brain into change. This technique is one of a number which Dr. Doidge explored the origins of its development and wrote about in his book.