The Backwards Brain Bicycle

I got the following video from Dr. Schubiner and I thought people might like it.

When healing from TMS, people often struggle with how long it can take. Once you have accepted the diagnosis, overcome your fear and resumed physical activities, there is often a long period as your body learns to become healthy again. Dr. Sarno taught us that there can be a long period of overcoming conditioning before we can resume certain activities (see, for example, pages 63-66 of The Mindbody Prescription for a primer. Marc Sopher's book also has a great introduction).

Pavlovian conditioning like this is a sort of learned nerve pathway. For example, in Pavlov's famous experiment, a learned nerve pathway was formed between the ringing of a bell and the presentation of food. Unfortunately, as this video demonstrates, it can take a while to retrain the brain. This is why it can sometimes take so long to heal: it takes a long time to "unlearn" the nerve pathways.

Dr. Schubiner wrote about the video that it is a "Great demonstration of neuroplasticity and how long it can take to train the brain. Very applicable to our work, I think and it can help to give people patience as they work through the unlearning/relearning process."

Here's the video:

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Excellent point, Ellen. I haven't noticed a strong connection between age and recovery time. Perhaps younger people recover faster on average, but not by much. I bet that there are a lot of factors that determine recovery time.

Perhaps there is a difference between learning new pathways (where kids have a big advantage) and unlearning old pathways (memory reconsolidation). Unlearning old emotional learnings is notoriously hard. Both the child and the adult had to learn how to ride the backwards bicycle, but given the relative ease with which Dustin resumed riding a regular bicycle in Amsterdam, it looks like he didn't "unlearn" the old pathways.

Perhaps in TMS, not only do you have to learn new pathways ("I'm safe," "my body is strong," "I'm fine the way I am"), but you also have to unlearn the old pathways related to the pain. It is undoing that conditioning and those thought patterns that can take a long time. Responding to symptoms with acceptance and uninterest rather than fear for example.

That's just a hypothesis, of course. I think that it is prudent to recognize that there are still some mysteries.

 

Oooh, that looks great. I checked it out and it's not available on NetFlix or Amazon where I am and I couldn't even view the promotional clips on the Australian Broadcasting Company because I'm from the US. It's a shame the way that digital rights can work.

I'm really glad that ABC is giving this great new science a wider audience, though. I'm really thrilled with what we are learning from brain science these days.

Plus, I found some links to some great other resources on the site for the show.

 

They say that it is much easier to create a new connection in your brain than it is to erase an old one...

 

Oooh, sounds fun! I checked with my GF (she's the multimedia maven; if it doesn't have a keyboard, I'm clueless) and apparently we only have region 1, though. I do have VLC on my PC, though, and it can open just about any sort of video file. Would that work?