Neuroplasticity is a concept that should have huge implications for victims of combat stress because it suggests that the events that change someone\u2019s brain can be changed again. Although something cannot be undone, perhaps there are ways to alleviate dramatic changes.<\/p>\n
To me, that suggests there can be hope for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).<\/p>\n
In his remarkable book, The Brain That Changes Itself,<\/em> Dr. Norman Doidge mounts a compelling argument that the brain is plastic. By that, he means that the brain adapts to the events that it encounters; in effect, it shifts its resources to meet changing conditions.<\/p>\n That\u2019s something most of us have encountered. For example, we may have known or heard about a blind person whose sense of hearing is remarkably keen. But Doidge takes that concept a step further. He writes about implanting electrodes into a monkey\u2019s brain and watching different electrodes fire up as the monkey\u2019s fingers explore an abject. Then all the fingers are taped together. After a few days of confusion, a new pattern emerges from among the electrodes as the monkey\u2019s brain recognizes that all the fingers are now acting as a single unit.<\/p>\n Doidge also writes about a woman whose vestibular system had been destroyed by an infection some years before, leaving her with virtually no sense of balance. She could not stand upright because she kept falling down. Then one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity, Paul Bach-y-Rita, devised a special construction-style hat that took the spatial measurements from her optical nerves and relayed them to a device in her mouth that transmitted them to her tongue. It not only allowed her to learn to stand erect again, but it also showed her brain how to rewire itself to allow the woman to keep her balance without the mechanical hat.<\/p>\n The concept of a brain evolving destroyed the earlier theory that the brain is a machine, a sort of super-computer that couldn\u2019t really change or grow.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron,\u201d Doidge writes in the preface of his book. \u201cThe neuroplastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addictions, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains. All of the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, insofar as they deal with human nature, are affected, as are all forms of training. All of these disciplines will have to come to terms with the fact of the self-changing brain and with the realization that the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes in the course of our individual lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Just think of the implications for combat vets!<\/p>\n PTSD is all about a brain being changed during combat. It\u2019s about that heightened awareness that comes to a soldier who knows he\u2019s in danger. His frontal cortex is analyzing all the signals from his eyes and ears, trying to sense the threat. That information is instantly passed along to the amygdala and the hippocampus, which are gearing the body up for a fight or a flight. The heart is pounding, the adrenaline is flowing, and the nerves are so tight they feel like they could snap under the strain. This is a normal response to danger. And when the threat subsides, it\u2019s normal for the body to return to \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/p>\n But when you get wave after wave of danger, the brain stays on high alert \u2026 and that becomes \u201cnormal.\u201d But when the danger disappears and the brain remains on high alert, that\u2019s what we call PTSD.<\/p>\n So far, our ways of treating PTSD haven\u2019t been very effective. Drugs such as psychotropic medications can dull the pain, but leave patients numb. Talk therapy can let a vet know he\u2019s not alone with his emotional wounds and can help him understand that what he\u2019s going through is a natural response to combat, but that probably won\u2019t alleviate the nightmares or the flashbacks or the instinctive response to hit the deck when a car backfires.<\/p>\n Now Doidge, who is on the faculty of the University of Toronto\u2019s Department of Psychiatry and Columbia University\u2019s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, is telling us that we should be able to change a brain back again. Obviously, we can\u2019t erase an event, particularly such a compelling one as combat, from our memories. But we might be able to weaken the combat images by changing the way the brain processes them.<\/p>\n More on that in my next blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Neuroplasticity is a concept that should have huge implications for victims of combat stress because it suggests that the events that change someone\u2019s brain can be changed again. Although something cannot be undone, perhaps there are ways to alleviate dramatic changes. To me, that suggests there can be hope for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}