Quotes from Jeffrey M. Schwartz

almost automatic response: "That's just a senseless obsession. It's a false message. I'm going to focus my attention on something else." At this point, the automatic transmission in your brain begins to start working properly again.

we cannot know what really happens, but only what we observe to happen.

The experience of learning how to Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, and Revalue was eye-opening for them because it allowed them to see that their time could be better spent on other pursuits and in healthier ways.

Charles Sherrington, the founder of modern neurophysiology, contended in 1947 that brain processes alone cannot account for the full range of subjective mental phenomena, including conscious free will. "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only," he wrote.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behavior, or at least a propensity toward a behavior, seemed to deal another blow to the notion of an efficacious will.

To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one.

It's like one obsession propels another that propels another.

The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain-footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken. This is neuroplasticity. As Mike Merzenich asserted, the mechanisms of neuroplasticity "account for cortical contributions to our idiosyncratic behavioral abilities and, in extension, for the geniuses, the fools, and the idiot savants among us.

Since attention is generally considered an internally generated state, it seems that neuroscience has tiptoed up to a conclusion that would be right at home in the canon of some of the Eastern philosophies: introspection, willed attention, subjective state—pick your favorite description of an internal mental state—can redraw the contours of the mind, and in so doing can rewire the circuits of the brain, for it is attention that makes neuroplasticity possible.

The biggest challenge you will face as you start using the Four Steps is in believing that you are worth the time and effort required to challenge the deceptive brain messages and not give in to their commands.

Cartesian dualism served science well, at first: by ceding matters of the spirit to men of the cloth, it got the Church off the back of science, which for centuries afterward was perceived as less of a threat to religion's domain than it would otherwise have been (pace, Galileo). But Cartesian dualism was a disaster for moral philosophy, setting in motion a process that ultimately reduced human beings to automatons.

The explanatory gap has never been bridged. And the inescapable reason is this: a neural state is not a mental state. The mind is not the brain, though it depends on the material brain for its existence (as far as we know). As the philosopher Colin McGinn says, "The problem with materialism is that it tries to construct the mind out of properties that refuse to add up to mentality.

The two diseases also seem to share a neural component. The symptoms of Tourette's apparently arise from impaired inhibition in the circuit linking the cortex and the basal ganglia-a circuit that is also impaired in OCD. The basal ganglia, you'll recall from Chapter 2, play a central role in switching from one behavior to another. Impairment there could account for the perseveration of obsessions and compulsions, as well as the tics characteristic of Tourette's.

In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism.

The striatum, and especially the caudate, can thus be thought of as a neuronal mosaic of reason and passion.

Since the striosomes receive projections primarily from the emotional centers of the limbic system and the matrisomes receive projections from the higher cognitive centers of the prefrontal cortex, together they provide the perfect mechanism of integrating the messages of the heart with those of the mind.

If it feels like it might be OCD, it is OCD! If it were reality, it wouldn't feel like it even might be OCD.

The brain's gonna do what the brain's gonna do," I told them, "but you don't have to let it push you around.

It is pointless to sit and ruminate about how dreadful your life is going to be if you act on a fearsome, violent, obsessive thought. You are not going to do it. Why not? Because the real you doesn't want to do it.

We are not passive recipients but active participants in our own process of perception (Nancy Kanwisher)

When a patient's mind is invaded by obsessive thoughts, even brief periods of Refocusing help, for they demonstrate that it is not essential to squelch intrusive thoughts entirely in order to engage in healthier behaviors.

The essential achievement of the will is to attend to one object and hold it clear and strong before the mind, letting all others-its rivals for attention and subsequent action-fade away like starlight swamped by the radiance of the Sun.

If you let your emotions cling to an OCD behavior, the behavior can easily get out of control.