July 2012
In the bad old days, it was thought the brain grew during childhood,
stopped changing in any way, then began a process of decaying, declining, and
dementia-fying. In those days the brain was viewed as a bit of beautiful meat, essentially, and
incapable of forming new neural pathways. The current sport of brain gym exercises
was not thought useful, even relevant. You were born with an x amount of
intelligence and you could be educated, but you couldn’t change your destiny –
so it was thought. If you got schizophrenia, you got something that damaged
your brain and a damaged brain is what you had. If you had obsessive compulsive
disorder, you had ocd. That was it. If you got post traumatic stress disorder,
you could be treated with medication, but that was it. Counselling, the talking
cure, was thought not to be effective in the treatment of these conditions,
except for offering care and support.
That old model of an inflexible brain has gone by the wayside. We are
now seeing the brain as a plastic organ (plastic in the sense of fluid, flexible and changeable, not the plastic of tuppeware!) where
grey
matter may shrink or thicken and neural connections are forged, refined
or weakened and severed in response to new encounters or habits repeated or
activities not practiced. This is a physical process that is expressed
physically, functionally, and chemically throughout life.
Brain or
neuro-plasticity, as a way of viewing the brain, excitingly and finally takes
account of the whole human being in body, experience, and psychological state,
for functionality is seen as not only being a result of brain process but a
contributer to brain physiology and its processes, as a reciprocal
process. Each time we learn a new
skill, like playing an instrument, or crocheting, or plastering, or enhancing
pre-existing skills, like writing, or cooking, or singing, we forge new neural
pathways in our brain which changes how we do things and how we experience
them, sensorially and in our thoughts, in other aspects of our lives. It is in
this two-way process that effective treatments are being found for the supposed
intractable conditions described above, and for slowing the rate of dementia.
Individuals exercising their brain through puzzles and learning new skills is
also extremely valuable. Treatments are now utilizing many of the techniques
developed and found useful by psychotherapists and counselors. Techniques we
developed from an interest in the interface between lived experience and story
telling, as well as more hard-core symptom control.
Acute trauma
counsellors, for instance, often use the method of asking the distressed person
to tell and retell, in detail, what happened to them, while sitting warmly and
comfortably and supported by the counsellor. Likewise, when the acute trauma continues to be experienced
years after the first event becomes chronic (when the neural pathways in the
parts of the brain iteratively repeat the course taken before), the
therapist uses the same method
with their client. We ask the client to tell and retell in as much detail as
possible what happened to them and what feelings arise in them as they give
account of the original traumatic
event. In the process of telling the story (I use this word advisedly for I do
not wish to imply a fictional account at all; this is real stuff), and
retelling it, an interesting capacity arises: a sense of being a witness to the
experience, which – over time – lessens its effects on the psyche and felt
experience.
It is interesting
that neuroscientists have recently found that getting a person with
post-traumatic stress disorder to write down and retell over and over, the
traumatic event, in minute detail, and increasing, in this mindfulness
exercise, what they call the impartial spectator effect (the witness) changes
brain physiology. The use of
magnetic resonance imaging show a shift from neural pathways used over and over
(the post-traumatic stress disorder brain) to vital new activity in the
person’s brain. The shift to a capacity to look impartially upon a previous
torment frees us physically, emotionally, chemically, and psychologically to
experience life entirely differently. All thanks to a plastic brain.
Healing, real
healing from a psychological wound is possible - at a deeply, neurophysiological level, at a functional
level, and at the heart of lived experience. Little, it appears, is fixed. Fluidity of being, a
creativity of being, and an awareness of being, integrally intermingle in the
healing that continues.
