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Organized around a series of visits made by the author, Norman Doidge, to contemporary neuroscientists, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science1 is an ambitious project. Written for a broad audience that includes professionals and the general public, the book reviews some of the key developments of what the author calls “the neuroplastic revolution” (p. xv) of the past fifty years.
Doidge tells the story of the history of neuroscience, bringing to life names that will be familiar to many, including Sherrington, Cajal, Luria, Penfield, Lorenz, Hubel and Weisel, Mountcastle, and Kandel. As a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Doidge is interested in thinking critically about the metaphor of hardwiring, which is sometimes used loosely to describe refractory psychological or neurological problems. His book richly depicts the plasticity —the malleability, modifiability—of the nervous system. Through his descriptions of visits with scientists as well as patients, the reader comes to understand the remarkable changeability of the human brain, even in the context of serious injury and symptom chronicity. Though much of the book involves descriptions of neurological or neuropsychiatric brain injury, a central message is that the therapeutic changes these patients are able to accomplish stem from the same neuroplastic potential that leads our psychoanalytic patients to change in treatment.
Unlike some writers on neuroscience who focus on the brain more than the mind, Doidge is devoted to an integrative perspective