It was Doidge, a psychiatrist and faculty member of both the University of Toronto and Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, who introduced the lay reader to the revolutionary idea that the brain is not fixed, that it is neuroplastic with the adaptive ability to reorganize itself, in The Brain That Changes Itself. In its wake, his inbox was flooded with e-mails from people debilitated by disease or injury who weren't supposed to get better but did.
He set out to meet their doctors, to learn about the energy-based treatments they used to influence the brain, and found himself immersed in a world of light, sound and movement therapy.
He met the patients whose lives had been brought back from devastation through the application of these treatments: the blind man who could see, the severely autistic child who had learned to speak, the Parkinson’s patient whose recovery was so complete some questioned the original diagnosis.
In his latest work, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, Doidge shares their stories, explaining how light, sound, mild electrical stimulation and even something as simple as "controlled" walking has helped tame what he calls the noisy brain - one in which disease or damage has caused neurons to misfire. These interventions, influenced by Eastern ideas of energy but in accord with Western science, use energy to influence these misfiring neurons, much as a conductor encourages an unruly orchestra to play in sync. And when the noisy brain is resynchronized, a person's function improves – significantly and swiftly.
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Source material from Globe and Mail