It was a fascinating book to read, revealing scientific insights into how the human brain works. Its chapters dealt with various aspects of the manner in which the brain works, its malleability, and capability of altering how we react, how we feel, how we function.

Pain is "created by the brain and projected onto the body", according to one noted scientific-medical investigator and he set out to prove just that. And according to the book, relating the experiments and their outcomes, repetitive action can 'teach' the brain to act otherwise, to activate new neurons that will not transmit pain to the body.

"Wall and Melzack showed that the neurons in our pain system are far more plastic than we ever imagined, that important pain maps in the spinal cord can change following injury, and that a chronic injury can make the cells in the pain system fire more easily - a plastic alteration - making a person hypersensitive to pain. Maps can also enlarge their receptive field, coming to represent more of the body's surface, increasing pain sensitivity. As the maps change, pain signals in one map can "spill" into adjacent pain maps, and we have developed "referred pain", when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another..."

Which goes a long, long way to explaining the mystery of "phantom pain", that peculiar sensation that people experience who have lost limbs, but feel that absent limb is still there, because their brain thinks it is, and transmits feeling from brain map neurons representing the absent limb so people experience the eerie sensation that it is still present, when it is not.

The book explores how culture with its deeply engrained habits can alter and transform the brain profoundly. As an example it looked briefly at Sea Gypsies, a nomadic people living on tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand.

"A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk, and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea, where they are often born and die. They survive by harvesting clams and sea cucumbers. Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food, including small morsels of marine life, and have done so for centuries. By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers. they do this without any diving equipment. One tribe, the Sulu, dive over seventy-five feet for pearls."

The Brain That changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge, M.D., is most certainly a provocative, worthwhile read.

Just think, to simplify our lives, all we have to do is successfully lecture our brains (minds) repeatedly to perform in ways that we feel it most convenient and likely to produce a well-rounded personality, a successful lifestyle, a healthy body and we're in the pink!

A 'happy face' should round out that suggestion.