A quick thought on neuroplasticity

As we probably all heard it by now: MFD is a neurological condition. This means that the origin of the symptoms is in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), and there is nothing wrong with the individual digits of our fingers or our lips. The problem starts with the control system where the signals running out to the body’s different parts through the peripheral nervous system (the huge web of tiny nerves in your body) originate.

So what happens in our brains? One of the most cited and widely accepted theory is that we lose movement control due to negative neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to form new synaptic connections, as it adapts to new situations. This happens every single time you learn a new skill. Babies and children form these new connections at lightning speed, which slows down a bit as we age, but the skill remains.

The idea is that this process somehow goes wrong, and the new connections lead to dystonic movements. It paints the picture of the brain in which something goes ‘click’ and as a result, we cannot play properly, and struggling with the simplest techniques on our instruments. There are many arguments and counter-arguments in the literature how exactly this happens, but no consensus really. I’ve written about these theories in detail here.

However, there is one very important point we, as musicians who are determined to get better, need to consider. Neuroplasticity isn’t a one-way street. The brain doesn’t come up with its own ideas about how a movement should be performed. Every single change, every new synaptic connection is a carefully computed result of the feedback it receives from the body. As an example, if somebody loses their eye-sight and start using a cane, very soon, a representation of the end of the cane starts to show up in their brains. They start to feel the tip of their cane as part of their own body. Simultaneously, the visual cortex, which is not being used, will be recruited to do something else. Our brains rely on feedback from our external world and adapt accordingly.

We label neuroplasticity ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ depending on whether we benefit or not from our new adaptation. But for the brain, it is just adaptation, seeking the safest, and most logical way to act based on past experiences and current feedback. And all of this is induced by movement, and the emotions and feeling accompanying it. If something is unpleasant, we’re going to shy away from it. You only have to touch a nettle once as a child to learn not to approach the plant again. And if you try, your body will be hesitant to create the movement.

So what does this mean for us?

“We can get neuroplasticity work for us, not against us. ”

It means that if we can change and control the feedback, we encourage positive neuroplasticity, resulting in a different response. Understanding what sort of feedback triggers the dystonic response is the key for recovery. What is the brain receiving? Why does it create our symptom as the ‘safest and most logical’ response at any given moment?

These might be a mixture of unconscious habits of how we move and stabilise ourselves, how is the dystonic body part is used, and what sort of (often subconscious) feelings accompany them. Once we change the experience for our brains, the response will be different. (This is why sensory tricks work for some people, like playing in gloves. However, I would not encourage it as a final solution - if only ‘one channel’ of the input has changed, our brains often ‘catch up’ and learn to produce the symptom under the new circumstances, but it is a whole different topic.)

So how do we change the input so we can end up with different movement patterns? This is what we work on in a coaching session: looking at the habitual postural, breathing, movement patterns and the accompanying thoughts and emotions, addressing them one by one, creating a new set of habits. This, however, does not mean that you have to re-learn to play from scratch! The beginning of the retraining often feels like being a clumsy beginner, but once the triggering elements are ‘cleared out’ and replaced by more healthy and natural movements, the body usually starts to remember.

The idea of affecting our own brain by movement seemed a fairy tale a few decades ago, but not it is a scientifically proven fact. We can have neuroplasticity working for us.