The book is immensely satisfying science for lay readers, that is to say for people who know Sweet Fanny Adams about neuroscience but are interested in the workings of human brains. The subtitle – Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science – is a fair summary of the book’s approach to its subject: each of eleven chapters matches the work of a scientist or clinician with the story of a person who has benefited directly from that work.

Seen from one point of view, the book is full of wonders. A woman born with only half a brain nevertheless reads, relates intelligently to other people, performs astonishing feats of memory, and dreams of a heaven tailor-made for her needs. People paralysed by stroke years earlier recover speech or movement through an intensive exercise regime. Persistent pain in phantom limbs is relieved using a mirror in a box. People move objects using only their imaginations (helped by electrodes attached to their brains and linked to computers).

From another point of view, it charts the progress of hard science catching up with common wisdom. Contrary to the dogmas of the ‘mental health’ industry, observable changes in the brain don’t incontrovertibly indicate physical conditions that can only be remedied by drugs, surgery or electric shock. The aggressive assertions of evolutionary psychologists look even more ideologically based than they did without this evidence. addictions, including to internet pornography, Doidge is a Freudian, and describes the progress of one man’s analysis as an exercise in neuroplastic therapy. In an appendix, ‘The Culturally Modified Brain’ he writes:

Neuroplastic research has shown us that every sustained activity ever mapped – including physical activities, sensory activities, learning, thinking and imagining – changes the brain as well as the mind.

I’m glad my primary schooldays included endless amounts of memorising. ( )

The first thing to be said is that Doidge is no writer--he dangles participles like a bastard, he has a Tom Clancyish sense of the physical traits, personality points, and biographical notes that will make "brilliant physiologist Paul Bach-y-Rita" or "Holocaust survivor Eric Kandel" into the kind of pat characters whose life and work can be rolled out in a cheap moviesque narrative. Some of his sentences don't even make sense.

But that turns out to matter very little, because the material at hand here is so, so interesting. I'm a little suspicious of Doidge's "for years nobody believed in neuroplasticity, but now they realize it will FIX EVERYTHING", but I think that's more the fault of the presenter, because wow, neuroplasticity is going to fix everything! The basic concept is that while most of our mental and physical functions may live in specific locations in the brain, that's not hard and fast as suggested by old localization creed--neural maps can move, and new areas can take over for old ones, and with repetition and exercise we can train our brain to function in new ways and learn or relearn skills that brain damage should mean we've lost or never had. Help for kids with autism, aphasia, old people with Alzheimer's! Help for the deaf and blind! Understanding how falling in love wipes out our old mental maps as we neuroplastically mold to our new lovers! Amputating phantom limbs! Helping people with OCD, obsessive thoughts, chronic pain. Understanding the imagination. A sombre but not sensationalistic discussion of how neuroplasticity informs the whole internet-pornography thing. Helping people lose undesirable personality traits by learning why they developed them in the first place. Even a girl who is a little weird but fully functioning WITH ONLY HALF A BRAIN.

And let's go back, briefly, not to the brain girl, as interesting as she is, but to the personality traits thing. As an English grad student who was just laughing about how all the suggested t-shirt designs for our program feature quotations, not from literature, but from critical theorists, because that's still the way fucking English programs roll ("Dare to Dream" -Lacan. Nice sentiment coming from anyone else), what interests me is the way Doidge, obviously interested in the future of brain science but also a fairly old-school psychoanalyst and believer in the talking cure, manages to square the circle, reminding us that Freud ("Yo mama" -Freud. the others are even worse) was originally a neurologist and bringing stuff about plasticity back to the familiar ol' Freudian notions about how we learn to be who we are--and bringing Freudian notions about how we learn habits to protect our fragile psyches down to what that actually is proving to mean in the brain, and how true it's proving to be. Freud first proposed neuroplasticity. Freud first proposed the synapse, and the simultaneous firing of synapses is behind his ideas on free association. Other shit like that. I admit I'm not really qualified to evaluate the evidence coming as it does only from Doidge the true believer, but when I'm spending days in psych classes with Carrie Cuttler pooh-poohing the very notion of anything Freudian having anything relevant to say to modern psychology, which lest we forget is a real science, it's nice to get a corrective, however much truth is in it, that says hey, Freud may not be experimental science by the modern standard, but he created a model of serious explanatory power, and not just as a gussied-up metaphor the way English students use it. there is also a discussion of Marshall McLuhan in terms of how the medium actually affects the brain. Actually taking theory as referring in non-parameaningful terms to things and processes in the real world, and laying it all out for us in such compelling, even if sometimes crudely expressed, terms, is . . . well, it kind of restores your faith in the public (even the pop) intellectual, is what it does. ( )

A readable and (mostly) appealing introduction to the idea of neuroplasticity and the neuroscience behind it. My one serious criticism of the content is what seems like a seriously off-kilter attitude toward sexuality. While the discussion of the dangers of the plasticity/pornography combination seem to me to be intriguing, if overstated, the discussion of BDSM seems...bizarre, at best, and antiquated and prejudiced at worst. Certainly it would be a better book if that section had simply been omitted. It detracts from the other compelling case studies that are real highlights of the book.

On the whole though, an intriguing introduction to neuroplasticity. I've got 4 more books on the subject on my "to be read immediately for work" list, and will be interested to see how the reviews of all of them shake out. ( )

This very readable book takes the layperson on a journey through a variety of cases and researchers involved with neuroplasticity. Where other texts have tended to focus on one aspect (e.g., brain injury, countering aging, psychotherapy), Doidge is unusual in that he combines rather different cases into one book. In this mix, you'll find the tales of recovery from stroke, the story of a girl born with only one brain hemisphere, and musings on neural changes after exposure to pornography. The brain is not set in stone in childhood; it continues to add new cells and form new connections between cells until the day we die.

Be warned, however; much of what we've learned about the workings of the brain has come from animal research, and the details aren't danced around in this book. In fact, the author spends quite a few pages defending the research using silverbacks conducted by Taub; he makes the case that PETA had its facts wrong and actually did more harm to the animals by taking them away from the lab. Readers will encounter examinations of the brains of sacrificed animals, but they will also find descriptions of human autopsies and their findings. For example, the findings of new cells in the final days of life aren't from indirect evidence, but direct observations from autopsies. Such descriptions do not make up the bulk of the book, but they are more than a few pages and particularly sensitive readers may want to find another book to read.

Weaving clinical anecdotes with background on prominent researchers, Doidge makes a very good case that research on humans and other animals can translate to improvements in quality of life for those with impaired development or brain injury. Well-referenced, the work tucks away literature citations at the end of the book so that they don't interrupt the flow of the narrative.

Although the chapters of the text cover a variety of cases, the commonalities of neuroplasticity come through clearly for the reader to make this work a unified whole. I recommend this book for any educated layperson who'd like to know more about the flexibility of the brain without learning a vast new terminology.

Good, readable introduction to the growing field of neuroplasticity. Should be required reading for anyone over 50--it's never too late! Extensive notes, references, and index. ( )