The Brain's Way of Healing [antikvár]

Preface This book is about the discovery that the human brain has its own unique way of healing, and that when it is understood, many brain problems thought to be incurable or irreversible can be improved, often radically, and in a number of cases, as we shall see, cured. I will show how this process of healing grows out of the highly specialized attributes of the brain—attributes once thought to be so sophisticated that they came at a cost: that the brain, unlike other organs, could not repair itself or restore lost functions. This book will show that the reverse is true: the brain's sophistication provides a way for it to repair itself and to improve its functioning generally. This book begins where my first book, The Brain That Changes Itself, ended. That book described the most important breakthrough in understanding the brain and its relationship to the mind since the beginning of modern science: the discovery that the brain is neuroplastic. Neuro-plasticity is the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience. That book also described many of the first scientists, doctors, and patients to make use of this discovery to bring about astonishing transformations in the brain. Until then, these transformations had been almost inconceivable, because for four hundred years, the mainstream view of the brain was