The Brain’s Way of Healing

The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity Audio CD – Audiobook, Unabridged
Author: Visit ‘s Norman Doidge Page ID: 1611763827

Review

Praise for The Brain’s Way of Healing
 
“Brilliant and highly original. Neurology used to be considered a depressing discipline with patients often displaying fascinating but essentially untreatable symptoms and disabilities. Drawing on the last three decades of research, Doidge challenges this view, using vivid portraits of patients and their physicians. The book is a treasure trove of the author’s own deep insights and a clear bright light of optimism shines through every page.”
—V. S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD, neurologist, neuroscientist, and author of The Tell-Tale Brain (W. W. Norton, 2011), Director, UCSD Center for Brain and Cognition 

“A tour de force. In one of the most riveting books on the human brain and its mystery powers ever written, Doidge addresses the role of alternative medical therapies to reset and re-sync the dynamic patterns of ‘energy in our brain, whit the ability to restore relatively normal health to those whose fate seems hopeless. . . . These are people that traditional medicine all but abandoned as . . . untreatable. But they were rescued. . . . It’s possible to start anywhere in the book and be mesmerized.”
—Huffington Post

“An exciting overview of powerful new neuroscience theories that connect mind, body, and soul . . . In this age of distraction and unnatural environments and actions—like staring at screens all day—brain science offers all kinds of useful techniques to care for our infinitely complex selves. Norman Doidge’s work is a Michelin Guide to this hopeful new trove of knowledge and insight.”
—Boston Globe, USA
 
“Brilliant and highly original. Neurology used to be considered a depressing discipline with patients often displaying fascinating but essentially untreatable symptoms and disabilities. Drawing on the last three decades of research, Doidge challenges this view, using vivid portraits of patients and their physicians. The book is a treasure trove of the author’s own deep insights and a clear bright light of optimism shines through every page.”
—V. S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD, neurologist, neuroscientist, and author of The Tell-Tale Brain; Director, UCSD Center for Brain and Cognition
 
“Doidge’s book is filled with compelling stories about the power of ingenious technologies and disciplined awareness methods generated by innovators who transcended their own brain challenges, and who now use them to help others make radical improvements in conditions often deemed hopeless. It points to a future of remarkable and unprecedented brain healing.”
—Martha Herbert, MD, PhD, Neurologist, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital, author of The Autism Revolution
 
“The Brain’s way of Healing is a stunner—the sort of book you want to read several times, not because it is difficult to understand, but because it opens up so many novel and startling avenues into our potential to heal. Norman Doidge enthralls us with a rich combination of lucidly explained brain research and pioneering new (and some not so new, but not widely known) approaches to recovery. With an eloquence reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, Doidge bolsters the latest advances in brain science with a series of extraordinary case histories of people for whom all hope seemed to be lost, but who healed as a result of great personal courage, and by changing the ways their bodies and brains processed sensations and movement. This hopeful book demonstrates that a variety of sensory inputs—light, sound, electricity, vibration, movement, and thought—can awaken the brain’s attention processors, and thereby allow even the most afflicted to (re)gain ownership of their lives. 
—Bessel van der Kolk MD, Medical Director, the Trauma Center, Brookline MA; Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine; Author of The Body keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the healing of Trauma

“The book offers real hope to individuals suffering from diverse chronic conditions. It shows in terms of graphic personal stories that we truly do not yet know the limits of what is possible in rehabilitation. The book also has a number of creative integrations of the data that will be of interest to neuroscientists.”
—Edward Taub, Ph.D., Behavioral Neuroscientist, University Professor,University of Alabama at Birmingham, Director, UAB CI Therapy Research Group and Taub Training Clinic
 
“Everyone who has a brain could benefit from reading Doidge’s book.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
 
“A vivid, robust and optimistic read . . . an essential addition to our growing understanding of the mind-brain-body connection. Doidge argues quite convincingly that when the brain is damaged or incompletely formed, whether from stroke, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, autism, ADHD or a host of other conditions, it’s entirely possible to “rewire” the circuits by training a different part of the brain to take over the task. . . . He’s positively elegant in his crystalline explanations of brain science for a lay audience.”
—Toronto Star, Canada
 
 “This is a book of miracles: an absorbing compendium of unlikely recoveries from physical and mental ailments offers evidence that the brain can heal. Fascinating . . . brings to mind Oliver Sacks.”
—Guardian
 
“Dazzling . . . In friendly vignettes reminiscent of Oliver Sacks’s case studies, Doidge chronicles the heroic efforts of patients with a wide variety of apparently intractable ailments, from chronic pain to multiple sclerosis. . . . Each of Doidge’s examples suggests tangible treatment ideas for patients who may have thought they were out of options. Doidge’s penchant for considering unconventional approaches to healing offers hope for all.”
—Bookpage, USA
 
“Beautifully written . . . inspiring . . . merging scientific information into timeless and fascinating personal stories . . . The Brain’s Way of Healing grabs onto the reader at once and compels them to keep reading. This is an important and encouraging book.”
—The Vancouver Sun, Canada
 
“Exhilarating science . . . In an era of ever-increIDg medicalisation of the human mind, and the medication of it, the appeal of neuroplasticity outlined by Doidge is addictive. It is inspiring, page-turning stuff.”
—Sunday Times, London

“A fascinating study on brain science that shows the way to major therapeutic discoveries.”
—Library Journal
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

NORMAN DOIDGE, M.D., is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and New York Times bestselling author. He is on the research faculty at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City and on the faculty of the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry as well. He lives in Toronto.

See all Editorial Reviews

Audio CD: 12 pagesPublisher: Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (January 27, 2015)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1611763827ISBN-13: 978-1611763829 Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.1 x 5.9 inches Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Best Sellers Rank: #242,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #271 in Books > Books on CD > Nonfiction #359 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Neurology > Neuroscience #573 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Neuropsychology
In his new book, Norman Doidge describes the role of brain plasticity in healing. This paradigm is helping us recognize how improvement from symptoms of all kinds is not only possible, but explainable, as well as reproducible.

Doidge artfully draws us in with people’s stories, including the experiences of Dr. Michael Moskowitz, a chronic pain specialist who figured out a way to cure his own increIDgly debilitating chronic pain after 13 years (chapter 1). He has also successfully taught the technique to some of his patients. In chapter 2, Doidge walks with John Pepper, a World War II survivor with Parkinson’s disease who devised a program that enabled him to recover lost mobility and other functions. Pepper uses his approach not only to keep many of his symptoms at bay decades after diagnosis, he has also taught it to others with Parkinson’s, who have also improved. More amazing stories and treatment approaches follow in each chapter and the case studies highlight this new paradigm. The research starts to explain the ever-elusive, until now, "why."

In easy-to-read connecting language Doidge gives us a framework for understanding what is happening during these transformations. He, and the studies he cites throughout, take us beyond our current understanding of the brain.

The principles of brain plasticity presented by Doidge can be summarized as follows (chapter 3):

Events such as strokes, infections, head injuries, radiation, toxins and degenerative processes cause brain injury and affect our neurons. While some neurons die following such events, the new science is showing us that some neurons start to signal in irregular ways following injury, which can make the brain "noisy" and confused.
My review of "The Brain’s Way of Healing" is that of someone who experienced one of the therapies he describes, the Tomatis Method, many years before Norman Doidge’s book was published. For me, this is a practical subject, and I hope to shed some light both on this book and to address the natural skepticism that one might has who has not experienced or known someone who has benefited from the type of therapies Dr. Doidge describes.

My life is an example of neuroplasticity. I was 40 when I found out about the Tomatis Method, described in Chapter 8 of Dr. Doidge’s book. I had never graduated college. I was born with a cleft palate, had speech therapy, and was developmentally slow. I was a traumatized child based on my childhood experiences. In my early 20s, I had cancer and was treated with chemotherapy and radiation at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In my mid-30s, I married a wonderful woman from the Philippines whom I met in the States. She was a doctor, and she did not care that I was less accomplished career-wise. It was her sudden death via car accident that plunged me into a phase that I could not pull out of. I was like an old fashioned record player where the needle got stuck in a groove. I traveled to the Listening Centre in Toronto, Canada in 2003. This is the same centre that Dr. Doidge talks about in his book. After doing Tomatis, the needle lifted, I wanted to live again, and I returned to college and finished a degree program within three years after completing my initial treatment. It’s important that I share that none of this happened overnight, and mine was not a one-time, cure all treatment. I have received Tomatis sound boosts over the years.
The human brain can rewire itself. This phenomenon, known for almost a hundred years beginning with the work of Karl Lashley, is known as "plasticity" and was popularized by Norman Doidge’s earlier book, "The Brain that Changes Itself". That book was based on contributions from several mainstream neuroscientists working in the field of brain plasticity.

In his new book, "The Brain’s Way of Healing", he goes further. And much farther – to a realm that is difficult to distinguish from the realm of alternative medicine and New Age healing. The healing claims here include how an astonishing variety of ailments – Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, anxiety, concussion, autism, dyslexia, ADHD, migraine, arthritis, chronic pain, dementia, to name a few, I kid you not – can be cured by the application of "energy" such as light, sound and electrical stimulation. And they are all free of side effects.

The fact that the human body can cure itself even when medical science has given up is not new. As far back as the 1930’s, Dr. Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering vascular suturing techniques, documented in his book "Man the Unknown", how a group of patients without any hope prayed and healed themselves. Then there is the mystery of the placebo effect, the inert pill with no medicinal value that cures various ailments. So we know that the human body heals itself, even though we have not fully understood the mechanism through which it accomplishes this. Much of the explanation for the placebo effect does not go beyond naming the phenomenon in various ways.
Download The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity Audio CD – Audiobook, Unabridged PDF Free Download

JoharHarsaya326