Quotes from Norman Doidge

Neuroplasticity contributes to both the constrained and unconstrained aspects of our nature. It renders our brains not only more resourceful, but also more vulnerable to outside influences.

Not all activities are equal... Those that involve genuine concentration - studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing - are associated with a lower risk for dementia.

Mind training matters. It is not just a luxury, or a supplementary vitamin for the soul. It determines the quality of every instant of our lives.

Everything having to do with human training and education has to be re-examined in light of neuroplasticity.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.

All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.

The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration—studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing—are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. (254)

We see with our brains, not with our eyes,

Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity.

If you want to lift a hundred pounds, you don't expect to succeed the first time. You start with a lighter weight and work up little by little. You actually fail to lift a hundred pounds, every day, until the day you succeed. But it is in the days when you are exerting yourself that the growth is occurring.

For children to know and regulate their emotions, and be socially connected, they need to experience this kind of interaction many hundreds of times in the critical period and then to have it reinforced later in life.

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person's ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.

an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a "microsurgeon of the mind" who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

He is social, but not in large groups. "I don't go readily to cocktail parties, where people just come together and talk. I don't tend to like that kind of thing. I'd rather sit down with somebody and find a mutual topic of interest, and explore it in depth with that person, or maybe two or three people. Not a conversation that says how do you feel".

No other instinct can so satisfy without accomplishing its biological purpose, and no other instinct is so disconnected from its purpose.

Moskowitz defined chronic pain as "learned pain." Chronic pain not only indicates illness; it is itself an illness. The body's alarm system is stuck in the "on" position, because the person has been unable to remedy the cause of an acute pain, and the central nervous system has become damaged.

Reduce the effort whenever possible. The use of force is the opposite of awareness; learning does not take place when we are straining. The principle should not be no pain, no gain. Rather, it should be if strain, no gain. Feldenkrais thought the use of willpower (of which he obviously had plenty) was not helpful in developing awareness.

9. Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs. Monumental gains, Feldenkrais discovered, are made not by mechanical movement but by the opposite—random movements. Children learn to roll over, crawl, sit, and walk through experimentation. Most babies learn to roll over, for instance, when they follow something with their eyes that interests them, then follow it so far that, to their surprise, they roll over.

Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience.

8. Errors are essential, and there is no right way to move, only better ways. Feldenkrais didn't correct errors or "fix" people.

As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways.