10. Brain Plasticity and Autism

The gift of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire and create new circuits at any age as a result from input from our environment and our conscious intentions) is that we can create a new level of mind.

Dr Joe Dispenza, DC

Lately, we human beings have become very clever. We have figured out that we can change our brains and make them work a whole lot better. We have begun to venture into a whole new paradigm of viewing who we are as humans and what we are capable of.

Neuro (brain) plasticity is an exciting new realm of discovery. We are finding that the brain is open to all sorts of influences and that it can re-wire. We now know that the brain can create new neurons and that it can build all sorts of new neural pathways. What was not working in the brain can now be stimulated, woken up and regenerated. Our brains are like gardens. We can plant new things, water them and bring them to life.

We used to think that our brains were fixed, like a machine, and that we just got what we were born with. Now we know that this is not true. Now we know that our brains are organic; that they are constantly growing and changing. Our brains change with new experiences and we can, if we want to, make all sorts of new neural connections whether we are eight or eighty. We are beginning to learn how easy it can be to make changes. People with strokes, people with chronic learning disabilities, are finding that different brain exercises can make profound changes in their lives.

Science has known since the fifteenth century that the brain can change, but it has not been until recently that we as a community have truly begun to believe in its potential. Individual scientists have been investigating brain plasticity for hundreds of years, but no one in the science community ever took them very seriously so, consequently, neither did we.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that things began to change. In 1969, Paul Bach-y-Rita devised a study with a large camera, an electrically stimulated chair and lots of wires and he taught congenitally blind people to recognize a picture of the supermodel Twiggy. Essentially he taught them to ‘see’. He had worked out how to teach the brain new signals, to teach it to convert tactile (feeling) information into visual information. It worked, and we realized just how much the brain works on signals and physical, electrochemical images.

This study helped us to understand that we are not made like machines, that our brains are actually bundles of electrical impulses and connections, and we shifted into a new paradigm of intelligence; one where we began to believe in the potential of quantum reality, of quantum change.

Paul Bach-y-Rita’s study was in response to his father having a debilitating stroke. Because of this, he was inspired to study brain rehabilitation and began to develop therapeutic brain exercises for his father that were so successful at waking up his mind–body connection that his father recovered completely. Bach-y-Rita’s father went from being paralysed to mountain climbing! The science community finally began to listen and explore.

In the 1980s, Barbara Arrowsmith began to work with creating brain exercises to improve her brain function. She did this because she grew up with what was then described as a ‘mental block’, but was actually a range of severe learning disabilities. She read and wrote everything backwards, had trouble conceptualizing language and could not understand the relationships to the point that she found it hard to do things like cross the street. She could not register pain with the left side of her body and was continually getting badly hurt.

Barbara Arrowsmith’s life was more than difficult until she came across some research that showed that her problem was related to a particular part of her brain. She decided that she would fix it. She made up exercises to stimulate and wake up the parts of her brain that didn’t work so well. It was courageous…and it worked.

Arrowsmith devised all sorts of ‘brain’ exercises to stimulate her brain. She would do things like draw clocks over and over again; making the times different until her brain began to register the relationship between the hands on the clock.

In a matter of weeks she began to see a massive improvement in how her brain worked. In a matter of months, where originally she could not read and conceptualize, she was able to immerse herself in all sorts of interesting philosophical texts. She could understand in a way she hadn’t been able to before. Her brain could finally make sense of things and her life changed for the better.

The brain can change. It was designed to change, to re-organize and improve; it is what it was born to do. Now that we understand the principles of quantum physics and are beginning to apply these concepts to healing ourselves, we are finding just how remarkable those changes can be.

Our brains have over 300 billion neurons in them and an almost infinite number of possible connections. There are more neurons in our brains than there are stars in the sky. We have so much potential for change and growth, andwe have so much potential for change and growth within autism.

This is a revolution. We can drive the brain correctively in almost any condition you can think of, ADHD, OCD, Autism…brain plasticity will become the major player of the future.

Dr Michael Merzenich, world-renowned neuroscientist

The latest thing in neuroplasticity is ‘meta-plasticity’. As meta-cognition is higher awareness of your thinking (meta means ‘above’, cognition relates to thinking), meta-plasticity is awareness of your brain’s plasticity. It sounds very grand, but what it simply means is that people are looking at how to make the brain more able to be plastic, more able to change. They are looking at brain fitness and what is clear is that the more the brain changes, the more it knows how to change. It gets better and better at changing the more changing it does. Every brain can improve and change. Every brain can get better and better at change.

Within autism there is the possibility of dynamic change. Anat Baniel (author of Kids Beyond Limits) and others are doing remarkable work with autists by helping them to reconnect their brain and their body. Being gently helped to learn mastery over their body–mind connection they learn to feel safe, secure and awake; they learn to let the world in. Brain plasticity has a lot to offer the autist.

The only thing to remember is that brain plasticity has to include the body. Children learn kinaesthetically. We all learn kinaesthetically. You learn with your body, you process information with your body. Learning is tactile, and sensate. Taking in new information is a physical, biochemical process – it changes you, becomes a part of you.

We have the opportunity to retrain our brain, but it is vital to remember that we do this much more efficiently when we remember to include the body, because all learning takes place in the body.