Episode #47. How much are we able to change? Rewiring old habits, neuroplasticity in action.
1Description
I became a neuroscientist the day my sister sat comatose in a lock up ward of a mental health hospital at the age of 21. As I sat in the hot and steamy room, with my sister stiff as cardboard, staring into space and the doctors saying they were not exactly sure of what was going on. I stopped being a pharmacist and started asking questions -like why do we not understand how the brain works? Why do we think it is ok to treat a girl with incredibly mild symptoms-like hearing voices- with a straitjacket and an overdose of haloperidol? It seemed to me-back in 1989- we do not know how the brain worked and treated it like it did not matter. From that moment on, I set my mind on working out how the brain worked, so that we would find better ways to help my sister. For the next 20 years, I proceeded from PhD in neuropharmacology, a postdoc in neurobiology and neuroscience in Canberra and then at a top neuroscience of addiction research center in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, United States. I really thought during this time, that if I could simply pull the brain apart, prod and probe it with the latest tools and technologies, I would find the “thing” that was not working and I could develop a medication to fix it. This was my dogged focus. With my mind honed in on this solution, that in my mind, was simply around the corner, I just had to keep pushing, applying better technology, reduce the problem down. It was not until some 20 years later, when one day I could not get out of bed, that I truly began to feel and see and learn how the brain works. I was writing a book chapter on the molecular mechanisms of brain resilience- that is the brain can learn to be resilient -just as it has learnt over centuries- to be stressed- we can change the brain, we can learn to become the boss of the brain. We can learn how to apply the principles and the power of neuroplasticity to change and train the brain.
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