How Thinking Makes It So

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the discovery of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change in response to experience. I stated that this is the hope and purpose of all rehabilitation. Without changing the brain, nothing much happens in the way of learning and the body is not going to change much either. Even with strength training, the initial phase of improvement is almost all neurological. Some studies have even shown that you can strengthen your muscles just by thinking about exercise!

This understanding is very exciting indeed, but there is a downside. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurophysiologist at Harvard university, explains that neuroplasticity can also lead to rigidity and repetition in the brain. Remember those ruts I wrote about? I'm sure we've all experienced difficulty changing a bad habit or destructive way of thinking. Pascual-Leone explains that the plastic brain is like a snowy hill in winter. "Aspects of that hill - the slope, the rocks, the consistency of the snow - are, like our genes, a given. When we slide down on a sled, we can steer it and wil end up at the bottom of the hill by following a path determined both by how we steer and the characteristics of the hill...But what will definitely happen the second time you take the slope down is that you will more likely than not find yourself somewhere or another that is related to the path you took the first time. It won't be exactly that path, but it will be closer to that one than any other. And if you spend your entire afternoon sledding down, walking up, sledding down, at the end you will have some paths that have been used a lot, some that have been used very little...and there will be tracks that you have created, and it is very difficult now to get out of those tracks. And those tracks are not geneticaly determined anymore." (The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge, p.209).

I think that is a great metaphor for the middle of a Canadian winter! More later on what those tracks mean and how to choose a new path.

"If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." J.D. Rockefeller