What Canadians Like to Watch on TV
Andrew Ryan
The Globe and Mail, Thursday September 30, 2010

The Nature of Things (CBC, 8 p.m.) airs a remarkable film, titled Changing Your Mind, showing how advances in the relatively new field of neuroplasticity is bringing hope to people afflicted by severe trauma, obsessive compulsive disorder and even schizophrenia. Your tour guide through the human brain is psychiatrist Norman Doidge, and he’s a very wise chap.


Dr. Doidge’s brain-bending adventure
Renowned author leads a neuroplasticity tour on The Nature of Things
By Theresa Boyle, Health Reporter
Toronto Star, Thursday September 30, 2010

Zong Liang once spent much of her day praying in an attempt to rid herself of inexplicable guilt and anxiety, part of a crippling case of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Through a promising therapy drawing on ancient Buddhist teachings about mindfulness, she has learned to listen to that part of herself that recognized that her compulsive urges were irrational.

“The impartial spectator tells me it’s not real, this is just the brain hiccupping, the brain doing what the brain does,” she says, explaining how she would force herself to do some other activity when she felt the urge to pray.

Her story is one of several fascinating case studies in Changing Your Mind, a documentary that airs on CBC TV’s The Nature of Things on Thursday at 8 p.m.

The documentary follows Dr. Norman Doidge, a bestselling author and internationally renowned psychiatrist, who introduces viewers to leaders in the revolutionary field of neuroplasticity. Recent insights into brain science are offering new hope to people with mental illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia.

This is Doidge’s second documentary for The Nature of Things on neuroplasticity, which holds that the brain can change its structure and function through mental experience alone. His first — based on his bestseller The Brain that Changes Itself — aired on CBC in 2008 and looked at how the rewired brain can help people recover after suffering brain injuries such as strokes.

Now Toronto-based Doidge travels North America to speak to pioneering scientists and people diagnosed with brain disorders to show how lives once written off as hopeless are being transformed.

“The mind can harness the damaged brain’s plasticity to change itself. We are finding new cures to diseases and disorders once thought incurable,” he says.

The documentary starts in Los Angeles where psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz is helping patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, including Zong Liang, to train their brains to quiet their impulses.

Schwartz explains how obsessive compulsive disorder gets worse when sufferers give in to unwanted urges, for example, repeatedly washing their hands. That’s because “neurons that fire together wire together,” meaning that the more sufferers think about germs and danger, the more they inadvertently wire together the connection between germs and danger in their brains.

But sufferers can learn to challenge the urges by recognizing that they are not dangerous attacks of germs but attacks of OCD. Through constant effort and attention, they can learn to resist the urges and in doing so, actually change the way their brains work.

“The OCD is kind of under my control. I feel like, wow, this is something everybody should know. If I could go on a mountaintop and shout how great it is, I would do it. I feel like mindfulness is the way to peace,” Liang says now.

Doidge is penning a second book on neuroplasticity and, like this documentary, it is focused on how it can help people with mental disorders. The discovery of neuroplasticity is the most important change in our understanding of the brain in 400 years, he says, explaining that it used to be thought that the brain was fixed and incapable of change.

The implications of this new understanding are enormous for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Doidge takes viewers to Montreal where work is being done by McGill University psychologist Alain Brunet to help victims of rape, child abuse and car accidents.

The brains of PTSD sufferers become so overwhelmed during a traumatic event that they are not able to properly file into memory the thoughts, feelings and perceptions that arise. So these thoughts, feelings and perceptions continue to emerge as though they are happening in the present.

Brunet guides them in recalling the traumatic memory in a controlled environment and bringing it into conscious awareness. Medication is used to help cut the emotional edge. Doing this a number of times alters the brain’s circuitry and allows the patient to file the mental events in the proper place, in the past.

Brunet has found that three-quarters of sufferers who have had the treatment have been cured.

“This novel approach might change the way we treat mental disorders that have at their core and emotional memory,” he says.

Doidge also visits San Francisco where scientists are making remarkable headway in treating people with schizophrenia using specially developed video games. This software training stimulates the brain to repair underperforming areas. Those receiving treatment have shown increases in cognitive processing speed, verbal language skills and verbal retention, all areas in which people with schizophrenia tend to have difficulties.

“Brain imaging also showed that the participants’ brains were changing, beginning to look less like schizophrenic brains and more like the brains of people without mental illness,” Doidge exclaims.

Doidge describes plasticity as a double-edged sword, explaining that the brain can change in both good and bad ways. The brain’s ability to change is what allows mental disorders to develop in the first place, he notes. But it’s also what allows these disorders to be treated and even cured.