The Brain That Changes Itself

You can probably tell that I have started on an orgy of summer reading but the book I wanted to talk about this morning is one I picked up at a friend’s place during my recent visit to Australia.  The book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge so intrigued me that I have ordered it from Amazon and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.  Listen to this description from the excerpt on his website

This book is about the revolutionary discovery that the human brain can change itself, as told through the stories of the scientists, doctors, and patients who have together brought about these astonishing transformations. Without operations or medications, they have made use of the brain’s hitherto unknown ability to change. Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged….

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must rethink our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing.

What particularly intrigued me was Doidge’s discussion of the difference in the way Asians and Westerners think.  It made me realize that Westerners don’t even understand what Asians mean by holism, a view reinforced in Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought.

Even when we talk about holism, Westerners think individualistically.  When we look at a picture we don’t tend to see the whole picture but rather focus on one object.  When we see that object in another context we can still recognize it.  Asians on the other hand tend to see the picture as a whole.  No one object stands out and if an object is presented in another context they may not be able to recognize it.

I feel that this understanding has huge implications for our faith and understanding of God.  We Westerners like to take God out of context.  We think that God can be understood outside the cultural context in which God is presented.  As a result we get very uncomfortable when people of other cultures start to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ in very different ways from how we worship this God.

But when we look at God in the context of a culture and see God as integral part of that culture we get a totally different view.  God doesn’t get lost, God, the Lord of the Universe infuses the whole picture, the whole culture becomes permeated with God and so what we see as worship changes.

Knowing that God is able to change our brains and our worldview so that we can have a more truly holistic way of looking at life is very heartening for me – but boy is it hard and it suggests to me that we need to totally reinvent the way that we do discipleship and teach spiritual practices.  What do you think?