400 years ago the metaphor for the brain
from the philosopher Rene Descartes was
that it was like the nerves were like
hollowed out plumbing and currents moved
up and down the nerves and we still
speak of currents but now electrical
currents then the model changed as we
developed electrical machines – you know
something like a circuit board but no
one could conceive of a non hardwire
circuit board so we started to think of
the brain as hardwired and now with a
computer
people tend in that master analogy to
think thought is something like the
software and the brain is the hardware
but what we really find if we just can
speak about the brain on its own terms
and not in terms of that metaphor his
thought actually can change the physical
structure of the so-called hardware and
its function and once you realize that
and dig into what the laws of that are
some very interesting possibilities
arise because I’m a doctor I started to
look at what illnesses or conditions
that you know people were suffering from
could be changed and part of that was to
help those people of course and part of
it was to test the idea if it was really
true you should be able to change some
illnesses by the second book I’m looking
at some pretty substantial some severe
neurological conditions and finding that
they can sometimes be changed to not
always but sometimes and sometimes
erratically so it’s a test of the
concept and at a certain point the
scales fall from one’s eyes and you
realize
we’ve got a lot of things about the
brain quite wrong you know I talked
about a girl was born with half a brain
and she’s missing the left hemisphere
which we used to process language and
she you would think she would be in the
ICU with tubes in and out of her but
that’s not the case her brain rewired
itself and she you know she can speak
and she votes in elections and she has
her favorite basketball team and so on
no that means that the brain is not
nearly as localized particularly the
outer parts of the brain for sure as we
thought but even some of the deep parts
of the brain so think about that but
what does that mean that you know
thoughts and that are not localized to
modules I think it’s the most important
change in our understanding of the brain
in several hundred years everybody
thought that the circuitry was formed
and finalized in childhood that gave
rise to a view of human development
human potential that taught people that
you’re stuck with what you’re born with
in a kind of absolute way I mean one
case after another in my second book
people are told you know your child will
never get better you will never get
better and so on it’s not possible you
you know if you had a stroke when you
were being born he of cerebral policy
that you know the assumption was that’s
it if you tried to maintain your brain
as you got older that was seen as kind
of a waste of time but even if we’re not
talking in medical terms your conception
of what’s possible let’s say in the
second half of life is radically altered
when you understand that there’s
plasticity from cradle to grave you can
reinvent yourself in certain respects
take on skills you never dreamed that
you could take on throughout the course
of your life that’s an incredibly
liberating thought and not only can you
but if you don’t challenge your brain it
probably won’t maintain itself so you
know the brain just like the body
requires some intensive work just for
maintenance it’s necessary to do
all the little lies that you tell
yourself about yourself the limitations
the belief systems that hold you back
they hardwire and they become real so
there’s really two kinds of pain there’s
an acute pain which tells you that
there’s damage to part of the body and
we don’t welcome it but it actually is
essential for our survival and some
people who are born with the genetic
tendency not to be able to feel pain
well they tend to die very young because
they’ll hurt their foot they won’t
notice it and they’ll die of an
infection chronic pain is damaged not
only to the part of the body but to the
the nervous part of the pain system
itself so what happened with Michel
Moskowitz is he was a psychiatrist
turned pain physician and he had a
number of mishaps or accidents one of
them had to do with a kind of a skiing
accident and so he wrecked his neck
initially it hurt him just around the
neck but the nerve kept getting pinched
over and over again and so the brain got
really good at registering that pain and
what was initially a kind of just a
strong thrust of pain lasting seconds as
the brain got better at processing it
the pain would last longer and it
started to spread from his neck to his
head to his shoulders and soon his upper
back and he was stuck with a chronic
pain syndrome now he started reading
about plasticity at this time and as a
pain physician he tried everything for
that chronic pain he so he tried all the
medications which are problematic to say
the least
nerve blocks so injections into various
nerves and a lot of complementary things
all the ones he knew about he was very
reminded and nothing touched most of us
think that there’s probably a pain
center in the brain that registers all
of this pain but in fact there’s about a
dozen different centers in the brain and
that’s the first thing to know but
what’s interesting about them is they’re
they’re distributed through the brain
and they in general or dual-purpose
centers so you may have noticed when
you’re in pain you might be irritable
and have emotional regulation problems
or you can’t pay attention or you can’t
do higher math now there’s reasons for
all of this so one of the areas that
registers pain also registers emotion
and what’s happening there is the part
when you have acute pain a small part of
that area will light up when it becomes
chronic about another 20% of that map
will light up and it in literally
invades the processing areas of the
motion so it’s not as good at processing
emotion plasticity is competitive within
the brain the same thing can happen to
the attention areas and to visual areas
so what moskowitz thought to do was
every time I feel that pain I will
visualize something it didn’t matter
what he visualized interestingly enough
to see if I can take back that part of
my visual map that is being hijacked by
pain so he visualized three actual brain
scans one of the brain not in pain so
the pain areas are not lit up one of the
brain and acute pain and so you’d have
about a dozen areas that had little
pinpricks of neuronal firing and then
one of the brain and chronic pain and
these pin pricks become supernovas and
he just imagined every time he felt any
pain whatsoever kind of dialing it back
from supernova to pinprick to nothing
he does this several weeks and he’s
always in pain so he’s always doing it
no result
by the end of you know another week he
notices these you’ve got about 10
seconds free of pain this is after years
of me
not even sure it was right by the end of
several months you know he’s got 15 20
minutes free of pain by the end of a
year of doing this every time it comes
up he’s off all his pain meds and he’s
completely pain-free wow he is he’s
destroyed his chronic pain syndrome in
my first book I describe people working
with obsessions and compulsions and it’s
a very similar thing they have recurring
thoughts that just won’t go away and
they they really have to know that you
measure the success of that day by just
thinking about how much effort you put
into it not whether the obsession a
compulsion or the way or the chronic
pain went away that day because you’re
creating a can new gear shift inside
your brain that will that’s build being
built up from scratch so that you have
conscious control or this to change it
and that takes a while the mindset
should not be conceived of as simply
whether you’ve got a reward today but
you understand it to be a human being to
have a brain is to be a creature that
learns and a lot of learning is
incremental and slow
what dr. Norman Doidge is talking about
is that we often create limitations for
ourselves that don’t need to exist we
create boundaries around our minds and
think that we are incapable of breaking
them down but that is just not true
whether you want to overcome pain or
replace bad habits with good habits that
is all possible and it starts with
retraining your mind and you can start
today so comment down below just one
simple task that you can do today to
start retraining your mind [Music]
from the philosopher Rene Descartes was
that it was like the nerves were like
hollowed out plumbing and currents moved
up and down the nerves and we still
speak of currents but now electrical
currents then the model changed as we
developed electrical machines – you know
something like a circuit board but no
one could conceive of a non hardwire
circuit board so we started to think of
the brain as hardwired and now with a
computer
people tend in that master analogy to
think thought is something like the
software and the brain is the hardware
but what we really find if we just can
speak about the brain on its own terms
and not in terms of that metaphor his
thought actually can change the physical
structure of the so-called hardware and
its function and once you realize that
and dig into what the laws of that are
some very interesting possibilities
arise because I’m a doctor I started to
look at what illnesses or conditions
that you know people were suffering from
could be changed and part of that was to
help those people of course and part of
it was to test the idea if it was really
true you should be able to change some
illnesses by the second book I’m looking
at some pretty substantial some severe
neurological conditions and finding that
they can sometimes be changed to not
always but sometimes and sometimes
erratically so it’s a test of the
concept and at a certain point the
scales fall from one’s eyes and you
realize
we’ve got a lot of things about the
brain quite wrong you know I talked
about a girl was born with half a brain
and she’s missing the left hemisphere
which we used to process language and
she you would think she would be in the
ICU with tubes in and out of her but
that’s not the case her brain rewired
itself and she you know she can speak
and she votes in elections and she has
her favorite basketball team and so on
no that means that the brain is not
nearly as localized particularly the
outer parts of the brain for sure as we
thought but even some of the deep parts
of the brain so think about that but
what does that mean that you know
thoughts and that are not localized to
modules I think it’s the most important
change in our understanding of the brain
in several hundred years everybody
thought that the circuitry was formed
and finalized in childhood that gave
rise to a view of human development
human potential that taught people that
you’re stuck with what you’re born with
in a kind of absolute way I mean one
case after another in my second book
people are told you know your child will
never get better you will never get
better and so on it’s not possible you
you know if you had a stroke when you
were being born he of cerebral policy
that you know the assumption was that’s
it if you tried to maintain your brain
as you got older that was seen as kind
of a waste of time but even if we’re not
talking in medical terms your conception
of what’s possible let’s say in the
second half of life is radically altered
when you understand that there’s
plasticity from cradle to grave you can
reinvent yourself in certain respects
take on skills you never dreamed that
you could take on throughout the course
of your life that’s an incredibly
liberating thought and not only can you
but if you don’t challenge your brain it
probably won’t maintain itself so you
know the brain just like the body
requires some intensive work just for
maintenance it’s necessary to do
all the little lies that you tell
yourself about yourself the limitations
the belief systems that hold you back
they hardwire and they become real so
there’s really two kinds of pain there’s
an acute pain which tells you that
there’s damage to part of the body and
we don’t welcome it but it actually is
essential for our survival and some
people who are born with the genetic
tendency not to be able to feel pain
well they tend to die very young because
they’ll hurt their foot they won’t
notice it and they’ll die of an
infection chronic pain is damaged not
only to the part of the body but to the
the nervous part of the pain system
itself so what happened with Michel
Moskowitz is he was a psychiatrist
turned pain physician and he had a
number of mishaps or accidents one of
them had to do with a kind of a skiing
accident and so he wrecked his neck
initially it hurt him just around the
neck but the nerve kept getting pinched
over and over again and so the brain got
really good at registering that pain and
what was initially a kind of just a
strong thrust of pain lasting seconds as
the brain got better at processing it
the pain would last longer and it
started to spread from his neck to his
head to his shoulders and soon his upper
back and he was stuck with a chronic
pain syndrome now he started reading
about plasticity at this time and as a
pain physician he tried everything for
that chronic pain he so he tried all the
medications which are problematic to say
the least
nerve blocks so injections into various
nerves and a lot of complementary things
all the ones he knew about he was very
reminded and nothing touched most of us
think that there’s probably a pain
center in the brain that registers all
of this pain but in fact there’s about a
dozen different centers in the brain and
that’s the first thing to know but
what’s interesting about them is they’re
they’re distributed through the brain
and they in general or dual-purpose
centers so you may have noticed when
you’re in pain you might be irritable
and have emotional regulation problems
or you can’t pay attention or you can’t
do higher math now there’s reasons for
all of this so one of the areas that
registers pain also registers emotion
and what’s happening there is the part
when you have acute pain a small part of
that area will light up when it becomes
chronic about another 20% of that map
will light up and it in literally
invades the processing areas of the
motion so it’s not as good at processing
emotion plasticity is competitive within
the brain the same thing can happen to
the attention areas and to visual areas
so what moskowitz thought to do was
every time I feel that pain I will
visualize something it didn’t matter
what he visualized interestingly enough
to see if I can take back that part of
my visual map that is being hijacked by
pain so he visualized three actual brain
scans one of the brain not in pain so
the pain areas are not lit up one of the
brain and acute pain and so you’d have
about a dozen areas that had little
pinpricks of neuronal firing and then
one of the brain and chronic pain and
these pin pricks become supernovas and
he just imagined every time he felt any
pain whatsoever kind of dialing it back
from supernova to pinprick to nothing
he does this several weeks and he’s
always in pain so he’s always doing it
no result
by the end of you know another week he
notices these you’ve got about 10
seconds free of pain this is after years
of me
not even sure it was right by the end of
several months you know he’s got 15 20
minutes free of pain by the end of a
year of doing this every time it comes
up he’s off all his pain meds and he’s
completely pain-free wow he is he’s
destroyed his chronic pain syndrome in
my first book I describe people working
with obsessions and compulsions and it’s
a very similar thing they have recurring
thoughts that just won’t go away and
they they really have to know that you
measure the success of that day by just
thinking about how much effort you put
into it not whether the obsession a
compulsion or the way or the chronic
pain went away that day because you’re
creating a can new gear shift inside
your brain that will that’s build being
built up from scratch so that you have
conscious control or this to change it
and that takes a while the mindset
should not be conceived of as simply
whether you’ve got a reward today but
you understand it to be a human being to
have a brain is to be a creature that
learns and a lot of learning is
incremental and slow
what dr. Norman Doidge is talking about
is that we often create limitations for
ourselves that don’t need to exist we
create boundaries around our minds and
think that we are incapable of breaking
them down but that is just not true
whether you want to overcome pain or
replace bad habits with good habits that
is all possible and it starts with
retraining your mind and you can start
today so comment down below just one
simple task that you can do today to
start retraining your mind [Music]
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