What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the natural ability of the brain to change its own structure in response to new situations, new behaviours or changes of the environment. Neuroplastic changes occur in a few different ways: by changing the neuronal connections, by sprouting new nerve endings and even by growing new neurons.

Neuro is for neuron, the nerve cells in our brains. Plastic is for “changeable, malleable, modifiable.” Without operations or medications you can make use of the brain’s amazing ability to change and transform your life in the direction you want.  This ability can help you stop bad habits, change your feelings and cure many diseases including the most insidious ones like eating disorders.

For the past four hundred years this new thinking was inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed. The conventional knowledge was that after infancy the brain can’t really change itself and was fully developed, only at old age when the brain starts the long process of decline was it believed to change.

This theory of the unchanging brain put people with mental and emotional problems under a lot of limitations. It basically meant that if you had a problem like an eating disorder, you more or less have to suffer for a life of taking drugs and being sick.

This kind of thinking made people believe that real treatments for mental disorders are always biological and involve drugs and that psychological (talk) therapy is not biological and just merely talk, so would not work.

But now, we have important data from psychoanalytical therapies and neuroscience that shows that when patients come in with their brains in certain states of miss wiring (mental states) then after undertaking psychological (neuroplastic) interventions their brains can be rewired without drugs or surgeries. This proves that neuroplastic therapy is every bit as biological as the use of drugs and even more precise at times because it is targeted.

To prove this fact American psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey M. Schwartz (UCLA School of Medicine) did some amazing research on his patients who suffered different form s of obsessions and compulsions. His patients went through neuroplastic treatment called “Four Step Spet4elf-Treatment Method”.

Before and after the treatment his patients had a PET scan of their brain. The PET scan showed that after neuroplastic treatment there was reduced activity in brain’s caudate nucleus (the centre of the brain which gets overactive with patients with obsessions).

Obsessions and compulsions are the main components of eating disorders but in relation to food.

So, this research showed that neuroplastic therapy can biologically change the structure of the brain and help people to be free from their obsessions without drugs.

To understand how neuroplastic change occurs read the article “Structure of neuron and neuronal connections (pathways)”.

Dr Irina Webster.