“Brilliant and highly original. Neurology used to be considered a depressing discipline with patients often displaying fascinating but essentially untreatable symptoms and disabilities. Drawing on the last three decades of research, Doidge challenges this view, using vivid portraits of patients and their physicians. The book is a treasure-trove of the author’s own deep insights and a clear bright light of optimism shines through every page.”
V.S. Ramachandran M.D., Ph.D., Neurologist, Neuroscientist, and author of “The Tell-Tale Brain,” Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego
In Doidge’s first book, The Brain That Changes Itself, he introduced the idea that the brain has plastic properties. His second book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, focuses on how brains damaged from birth, or by illness or injury can gain or regain some or all cognitive and motor functionality through neuroplasticity…. With unassuming respect for all he observes, Doidge profiles the pioneers and practitioners of neuroplastic therapy and healing…. Each extraordinary story features an extraordinary doctor with their own extraordinary experience. Doidge’s passion for healing might be expected, given his own medical training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst but, as he says, “the true marvel is…the way that the brain has evolved, with sophisticated neuroplastic abilities and a mind that can direct its own unique restorative process of growth”. You can read a lot about it in this book.
Lancet Neurology
They thought that the brain
was too sophisticated for its own good.
That during evolution it became so complex
that it lost the ability to repair itself and
to restore lost functions
or to preserve itself.
They were wrong.
Because it turns out that its very sophistication
can at times be the source of a unique kind of healing…
The brain’s way of healing…
The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
In his first book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge introduced readers to the most important change in our understanding of the brain since the beginning of modern science: the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience—the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Now, his revolutionary new book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, shows, for the first time, how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing really works.
For centuries it was believed that the price we paid for our brain’s complexity was that, compared with other organs, it was fixed and unregenerative—unable to recover mental abilities lost because of damage or disease. The Brain’s Way of Healing turns that belief on its head, as Doidge lucidly explains how the brain’s capacities are highly dynamic, and how its very sophistication makes possible a unique and gentle kind of healing. He describes natural, noninvasive avenues into the brain provided by the forms of energy around us—light, sound, vibration, movement—that can pass through our senses and our bodies to awaken the plastic brain’s own transformative capacities without surgery or medication and their unpleasant side effects or risks.
Using this more nuanced understanding of how our brains work, scientists and practitioners have learned how to use neuroplastic therapies to address many common conditions and to offer hope where prospects for healing were long denied. We see patients in whom years of chronic pain have been alleviated, and others who have recovered the ability not just to walk or talk but to live fully despite debilitating strokes, as well as cases of long-standing brain injuries cured or vastly improved. We meet children on the autistic spectrum or with learning disorders or attention deficit disorder who have used neuroplastic techniques to achieve normal lives, and sufferers who have seen symptoms of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and cerebral palsy radically diminished. And we learn how to vastly reduce the risk of dementia, or improve the brain’s performance and health, with simple approaches anyone can use.
Neuroplastic healing is truly one of the life-changing breakthroughs of modern science—“mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff,” in the words of The New York Times, describing Doidge’s first book. Here, he uses both astonishing, moving human stories and reports from the frontiers of an exciting field in brain science, putting it all together to help us recognize how mind, brain, and body, as well as the energies around us, are all essential elements that combine in health and healing. This is a book with the potential to transform, to heal, and to offer hope.
Available, so far, in 22 languages:
The Brain’s Way of Healing is now available in over 100 countries, and 22 languages including translations from English into Bulgarian, Chinese Traditional Characters, Chinese Simplified Characters, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese-Brazil, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
English Editions: North American Editions, (Viking Penguin U.S.A.) UK Edition, (Penguin U.K.) Australian & New Zealand Edition (Scribe) Kindle Edition, Amazon.
Audio books by Brilliance Audio in North America, and Bolinda in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand