Dance of Shiva, neuroplasticity and the brain.

Now, with extra science!

Okay, now I’m just being silly.

I’ll stop talking now and let her do her thing!
– Havi

What’s the brain got to do with it?

Shiva Nata has changed my life immeasurably, delivering mind-boggling emotional and work-related breakthroughs. And yet my stubbornly ungrateful intellectual-side can’t help thinking but WHYYYYYYYYYY?

“Pattern-shifting. Epiphanies. That sounds just lovely”, says my airy-fairy side.

“But what the f—- does that meeeeeeannnn?” demands the eye-rolling, intellectual-side.

Enter neuroplasticity.

Oooh, yes! [vigorous head-nodding] We both like that word. Nice and science-y, yet somewhat mysterious at the same time.

The accepted doctrine in medical and scientific circles for most of the 20th century was that the human brain was like a machine. That it had certain locations which corresponded to specific functions, and these were fixed in place after the critical period of brain-development in childhood.

So, for example, if a stroke victim had damage to the physical part of the brain that was “mapped” to move their right leg, then there was no hope of ever recovering that ability, because that part of the brain-machine was simply broken.

Neuroplasticity is the idea that the brain is more like a fluid organism than a fixed machine.

As recently as the 1970s rogue scientists would be laughed out of their labs for suggesting such heresy, but today it is pretty well-accepted that the adult human brain is capable of re-mapping its pathways.*

This concept of the changeable adult brain has far-reaching effects. It is what stands behind the most promising treatments for stokes, autistism, blindness, deafness (the cochlear implant works because of neuroplasticity), and depression.

The rest of us get to experience this concept on a slightly less dramatic scale.

If the pathways that neurons travel in our brains are plastic, that means that we can change them. We can physically create connections where there were none before.

Which means we can shift entrenched habits and old patterns of thought, while allowing a bigger capacity for un-learning and re-learning.

This knowledge brings all sides of me into harmonious alignment.

Now during Shiva Nata when my leg spazzes forward when I meant for it to go back, and I experience that delicious brain-scramble feeling, my internal dialogue goes something like this:

Airy-fairy-side: Ooh fun!

Intellectual-side: Aha yes, neuroplasticity at work.

*A great book on this topic is The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD.

(And another useful resource for learning more about this subject is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley. — Ed.)