Quotes from Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Chet found another way to best the OCD: Every time he had an OCD thought, he would do something nice for his fiancée—buy her roses, perhaps, or cook her dinner. Whenever the OCD wanted to make him miserable, he would make himself happy by making his fiancée happy.

Actual physical practice produced changes in each volunteer's motor cortex, as expected. But so did mere mental rehearsal, and to the same degree as that brought about by physical practice. Motor circuits become active during pure mental imagery. Like actual, physical movements, imagined movements trigger synaptic change at the cortical level. Merely thinking about moving produced brain changes comparable to those triggered by actually moving.

Acquiring navigational skills causes a redistribution of gray matter in the hippocampus as a driver's mental map of London grows larger and more detailed with experience.

That one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has…any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent…but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to…my readers.

This statement was tremendously gratifying because it stated, from a physicist's perspective, what seemed to me the essential core of all my OCD work: that effort itself is the key to altering one's brain function. Stapp's insight was that quantum theory naturally allows for the direct influence of mental effort on the function of the brain. It thus makes mental effort and its effect on attention a primary causal agent.

You create your brain from the input you get, says Paula Tallal.

For quantum theory elegantly explains how our actions are shaped by our will, and our will by our attention, which is not strictly controlled by any known law of nature.

The role of observation in quantum physics cannot be emphasized too strongly. In classical physics, observed systems have an existence independent of the mind that observes and probes them. In quantum physics, however, only through an act of observation does a physical quantity come to have an actual value.

Obsession comes from the latin verb that means to besiege.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. —T. H. Key Of

It turns out that the key predictor of whether the Four Steps will help an OCD patient is whether he learns to recognize that a pathological urge to perform a compulsive behavior reflects a faulty brain message—in other words, to Revalue it.

It is wrong," Bohr once said, "to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

The area of the brain devoted to the reading finger of expert Braille readers was much larger than that of the nonreading finger, or of either index finger in nonreaders, Pascual-Leone found. It was a clear case of sensory input increase, with the person paying close attention, leading to an expansion of the brain region devoted to processing that input.

Training in rapid acoustic discrimination can apparently induce the left prefrontal cortex, which is normally attuned to fast-changing acoustic stimuli but is disrupted in dyslexics, to do its job. The region, even in adults, remains plastic enough...to develop such differential sensitivity after intensive training, the scientists concluded.

If kittens do not receive visual input between thirty and eighty days after birth (a window of time now known as the critical period), it is too late: the unused eye is blind forever.

But although Taub had no trouble questioning the received wisdom in neuroscience and harbored no doubts that he, an outsider from the lowly field of behavioral psychology, had the right to question neuroscience 'facts' dating back a century, it never dawned on him that using what were then (regrettably) not uncommon laboratory procedures would earn him a singular distinction: the first scientist ever charged with animal cruelty.

Compared to the brains of normal controls, the brains of our OCD volunteers showed hypermetabolic activity in the orbital frontal cortex, which is tucked into the underside of the front of the brain above and behind the eyes (hence its name) as shown in Figure 1 on page 63. The scans showed, too, a trend toward hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus.

In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.

He (Rene Descartes) posited the existence of two parallel yet separate domains of reality: res cogitans, the thinking substance of the subjective mind whose essence is thought, and res extensa, or the extended substance of the material world. Mental stuff and material (including brain) stuff are absolutely distinct, he argued.

Intention governs attention, and attention exerts real, physical effects on the dynamics of the brain.

Damn it, I can't believe I'm going to let a choice in my life that's this major be dictated by OCD." This is assertive Relabeling.

In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can't decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won't.

We now know beyond a reasonable doubt that it doesn't go away because it's due to a medical condition, a biochemical imbalance in the brain. By Reattributing the pain to this medical condition, you strengthen your certainty that it is not your will, not you, and that it won't take over your spirit. You are still intact and able to make conscious, considered decisions in response to your pain.

the harmful strategies used to avoid and escape those uncomfortable sensations vary depending on the content of the deceptive brain messages and the patterns you have developed to attempt to deal with distress. The range of possible responses is endless and includes feeding an addiction, getting into an argument, avoiding a situation, shutting out the world, or endlessly checking something.