Norman Doidge thinks the most important change we’ve had in centuries in our understanding of the human brain is its degree of neuroplasticity. In layman’s terms, this means that an adult brain is not a static object; it can change its structure in response to our actions, perceptions, thoughts, and imaginations.

Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself (which has also been made into a documentary), deals with recovered stroke victims, a woman with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, and a blind man seeing for the first time through video input fed into his tongue.

Doidge completed both his undergraduate degree (in Classics and Philosophy) and his medical degree at the University of Toronto. An award-winning poet, essayist, author, psychoanalyst, and research psychiatrist at U of T, Dr. Doidge is currently working on a novel and another book on the brain.

Deborah Chan sat down with Doidge to talk about neuroplasticity, medical school, and how technology affects our brains.

Deborah Chan: How has your work on The Brain That Changes Itself affected the way you think about the brain?

Norman Doidge: I still have to pinch myself that the brain can change as much as I’ve been able to witness. When I’m confronted with a new sad story—say, somebody who has had a stroke and can’t talk or move—I know now that it might be reversible to a significant degree if you apply the right kind of intervention. But I still have to remind myself not to get pulled into the kind of neurological fatalism that we were all pulled into when we believed the adult brain is unchangeable.

DC: What are the implications of neuroplasticity for all of us?

ND: Neuroplasticity shows that your learning days never have to be over. Even aspects of your character that you thought were utterly inalterable may well be alterable, though it is a very serious undertaking to do so. This isn’t wishful thinking like The Secret. The people who’ve changed themselves in my book all had to do a tremendous amount of hard work. But the changes described in my book were never thought possible. They’re not simple mood changes or short-term attitude changes, they were changes in their brains’ processing power. That’s pretty awe-inspiring.

Understanding neuroplasticity gives you a means to an end. But the ends to which we direct ourselves still have to be determined by careful, wise reflection. So what you choose to do with your brain is still ultimately a philosophical question. It requires wisdom. It’s not a scientific one.

DC: Did you have any epiphanies when writing your book?

ND: I remember I was walking down the train tracks near Chaplain Crescent, and I just had a sense that the human nervous system, because it’s plastic and works with electrical signals, is unnervingly able to combine with the electronic media. They’re such similar systems. This is why we take to electronic media, and this is why we’re so vulnerable to it. Marshall McLuhan basically said that electronic media is an extension of our nervous systems. And having studied the brain, I was starting to see from the inside how that might be possible. He was definitely prophetic about this. That said, my main point is that our brains are not machines, and this is not a marriage made in heaven.

DC: We sort of live in a “Big Brother” age, in that at any moment our actions could be video-recorded on a cell phone and uploaded to the entire world. What do you make of the Internet, and of our generation being the most interconnected generation yet?

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ND: The Internet makes possible the idea of everything being recorded, and nothing being forgotten. You could write a beautiful Greek myth about someone—and in fact, there are such human beings—who can’t forget anything. These people end up being very troubled human beings. Repression and forgetting are there for a reason. You say “sort of” a Big Brother age, but half the world is either totalitarian or a dictatorship. It’s hard to imagine those totalitarian regimes not having some interest in knowing who is looking at what. I think we have been recklessly indifferent to the implications of the absence of forgetting in the digital age. It probably is being abused right now. How can you imagine organized crime being able to resist having access to all this information, such as centralized medical or financial records?

The information overload we are all suffering from is a lot like the condition that autistic children endure. They cover their ears to shut out stimuli. And it is interesting that their brains are in fact “overconnected”—too many parts talking to each other at once. It’s a form of hyperplasticity. I fear our wired world is overconnected.

It’s a cliché to say, but the wired world is very, very distracting. Shakespeare did not have a laptop, and he managed, by the time he was in his mid-fifties, to write all his plays, right? Has anything as interesting as what Shakespeare wrote been written on a computer?

If you look at the vast majority of information on the Internet, in general, it’s pretty superficial. If you say to me, “Oh yes, but I can get all of Shakespeare’s works on the Internet,” I’d say, “Okay, but that wasn’t produced by the Internet.”

DC: Yeah. And what are the page views for that, as opposed to Perez Hilton’s blog, right?

ND: Right. Exactly. The electronic age allows you to ride off in many directions at once, but human beings only have so much energy in their lives. And what you do with that is really important.

I say this as a person who has a foot in both worlds. I used to spend hours looking at one sonnet, memorizing it, really trying to think about it. When I was 19, I was in a very aural world, very sound-based world. Now I’ve got a foot in the electronic world and I can just say that if I had to choose between the two of them, I would definitely choose that older world. I think it’s more conducive to human happiness, in a deep way.

DC: At the age of 19, you won the E.J. Pratt Prize for poetry, which Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje have also won. How do you think you had wired your brain at that point, to be so productive?

ND: I was the child of a Holocaust survivor, and people who had fled the pogroms in Russia, so at a very early age, I was very happy to be alive. It was a very improbable event, since pretty much everybody in my family had been wiped out. So I never had an existential crisis. If I did something, I really threw myself into it. I didn’t waste time.

On the other hand, when I did read and think, my brain was wired to go very slowly, because when you read poetry, you honestly savour every syllable. So switching into medical school, where people were memorizing vast amounts of material, required me to rewire my brain in some ways. It was a massive undertaking.

DC: How did you find U of T medical school?

ND: Overall, it was like there was this large beast without a brain. Nobody on top, seriously thinking, “What must it be like to go through this?” The amount of work, the number of hours that were required, was decidedly unhealthy. By the way, that applies to most medical schools.

DC: One thing that you mentioned in your book was that the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich is working on a mental eraser device that will eliminate unwanted brain maps, which sounds like something straight out of science fiction. Do you know where that is?

ND: I don’t know where that is. But I do know that when you’re a psychiatrist, and you’re dealing with traumatized patients, the idea of erasing certain neuronal connections is something that could do a lot of good.

Of course that sounds like the science fiction writer’s dream because it could be a great example of science going awry. And probably a lot of people would like to erase a lot of things, so it will be abused. But isn’t that what a lot of people drink alcohol for? They want to erase their fears, or their identity of themselves as a loser or the shy one, and of course when we have terrible pain, we want to erase pain.

There’s work right now in Montreal with people who have been raped or traumatized that kind of uses this eraser idea. You remember the memory at a time that you take a drug that turns off your autonomic nervous system, so that the memory doesn’t trigger a fight-or-flight terror response any more—that’s an erasing of a connection. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? For a person who was assaulted and who panics every time he or she sees a person with a superficial resemblance to the attacker? So this work is actually precise and helpful. It may seem odd to say it in a university, but unlearning is as important to think about as learning. They both have different plastic chemistries as well.

The digital age, if not handled properly, will lead to the inability to erase anything. Others have made this point, that not only will nothing be erased, but everything will be able to be taken out of context, because you’ll be able to take a little bit of something someone said. So the kind of human being who would triumph in an age like that would be a humourless person who never uses irony or sarcasm, never says the opposite to make a point, and never takes a risk.

DC: Maybe we’ll become savvier, and more skeptical, with all of the openness of information.

ND: But here’s the problem: a doctrinaire passion for openness, transparency, authenticity, and sincerity sounds high-minded, but actually leads to inauthenticity. It’s my impression that you cannot have a self if you don’t have a sense of privacy. The sense that there are non-transparent boundaries behind which you can reflect, and think, and not be influenced by what other people are thinking and their agendas, is absolutely essential. When everyone is wired to everybody, it gradually decreases privacy. Right now, people are drunk with the joy that you can come home at night and not feel that lonely because you can get on the Internet and reach everyone and anyone. But I suspect that the cost of this is the collapse of that envelope around ourselves that’s necessary to build and maintain a self.

So, this is a massive social experiment that’s being conducted. But when people don’t have a sense of privacy where they can develop themselves, they become like lemmings and they start increasingly to develop all the predictable boring concerns that everybody else has.

DC: What role has spirituality played in your life?

ND: Well, talk about plastic. Spirituality is a very plastic word, in a linguistic sense. Everyone has a different meaning for that. I can say this much: I’m a very soulful person, whatever that means. And that’s driven me.


The print version of this article incorrectly referred to Doidge as a neuroscientist, when he in fact is a psychiatrist and writer.