(this is book 500!)
The brain can shut
pain off because the actual function of acute pain is not to torment us but to
alert us.
The pain perception
system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and that the brain, far
from being a passive recipient, controls how much pain we feel.
Chronic pain is
plasticity gone wild.
When the neurons in
our pain maps get damaged, they fire incessant false alarms, making us believe
the problems in our body when it is mostly in our brain. Long after the body has healed, the pain
system is still firing. The acute pain has developed an afterlife: it becomes
chronic pain.
The mind-brain-body
healing process is not merely a general, non-specific process that resets the
entire nervous system, the way relaxation does.
Mysteriously -- because we don't yet know the mechanism -- it targets
only what the patient believes is the focus.
Exercise helps fend
off degenerative disorders and can defer dementia.
Fifteen percent of
our brain cells are neurons; the other 85 percent are glial cells.
Walking, so natural,
so "pedestrian" (in the sense of the ordinary), may not be a
high-tech neuroplastic technique, but it is one of the most powerful
neuroplastic interventions. When we walk
fast, regardless of our age, we produce new cells in the hippocampus, the brain
area that plays a key role in turning short-term memories into long.
Walking was a key
contributor to a very simple program that reduced the risk of dementia by a
staggering 60 percent.
In sleep the glia
open up special channels that allow waste products and toxic buildups
(including the proteins that build up in dementia) to be discharged from the
brain through the cerebral spinal fluid, which bathes much of the brain. This unique channel system is ten times more
active in the sleeping brain than in the waking state.
In China,
acupuncture was routinely used to treat strokes.
When a human stands,
a group of muscles --- the antigravity muscles of the back and the quadriceps
-- holds a person up.
