AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
The brain that changes itself3/16/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() When we talk of “feeling settled” or “unsettled,” “balanced” or “unbalanced,” “rooted” or “rootless,” “grounded” or “ungrounded,” we are speaking a vestibular language, the truth of which is fully apparent only in people like Cheryl. In the 1930s the psychiatrist Paul Schilder studied how a healthy sense of being and a “stable” body image are related to the vestibular sense. And she has a rare form of anxiety that has no name.Īn unspoken and yet profound aspect of our well–being is based on having a normally functioning sense of balance. Soon after her problem began, she lost her job as an international sales representative and now lives on a disability check of $1,000 a month. She is very tired, and her sense that she is in free fall is driving her crazy because she can’t think about anything else. “There have been times,” says Cheryl, “when I literally lose the sense of the feeling of the floor… and an imaginary trapdoor opens up and swallows me.” Even when she has fallen, she feels she is still falling, perpetually, into an infinite abyss.Ĭheryl’s problem is that her vestibular apparatus, the sensory organ for the balance system, isn’t working. “Does the sense of falling go away once you’ve landed?” “What do you feel when you’ve fallen?” I ask her. When she tries to walk, she has to hold on to a wall, and still she staggers like a drunk.įor Cheryl there is no peace, even after she’s fallen to the floor. Only this gang is actually inside her, and has been doing this to her for five years. Watching her more closely, I can see that as she tries to stand still, she jerks, as though an invisible gang of hoodlums were pushing and shoving her, first from one side, then from another, cruelly trying to knock her over. “Yeah, I feel I am going to jump, even though I don’t want to.” “You look like a person teetering on a bridge,” I say. She doesn’t look like she is only afraid of falling, more like she’s afraid of being pushed. Soon her whole body is moving chaotically back and forth, and she looks like a person walking a tightrope in a frantic seesaw moment before losing balance–except that both her feet are firmly planted on the ground, wide apart. First her head wobbles and tilts to one side, and her arms reach out to try to stabilize her stance. When she stands up without support, she looks, within moments, as if she were standing on a precipice, about to plummet. And because she feels like she’s falling, she falls. In this excerpt, he writes about the breakthrough of a woman who, for five years, couldn’t stop falling down.Ī NEW SCIENCE HELPS PEOPLE GAIN (OR REGAIN) IMPORTANT SKILLSĬheryl Schiltz feels like she’s perpetually falling. In The Brain That Changes Itself, the doctor puts the lie to centuries-old notions that the brain is unchangeable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, MD, traveled the country to meet scientists championing a new field called neuroplasticity, and the patients it’s helped, including people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |