Quotes from Norman Doidge

The rhythm of the chant often corresponds to the respiration of a calm, unstressed person, and it has an immediate calming effect—probably by entrainment. Entrainment is a process in which one rhythmic frequency influences another, until they synchronize, or approach synchronization, or have a strong influence on each other. In a somewhat different way, waves of water influence one another when they intersect.*

The more education we have, the more socially and physically active we are, and the more we participate in mentally stimulating activities, the less likely we are to get Alzheimer's disease or dementia.

and in one moment, his completely conscious brain turned all his pain off. If only he could learn how to flip that switch for his patients!

Merzenich mapped a monkey's entire hand map. He began by touching the monkey's first finger and seeing which brain area started to fire. Once he found its brain map and defined its borders, he went on to the next finger. He found five finger areas, side by side for each of the five digits. Then

Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves. While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be "improved," the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems.

Dr. Bastiaan Bloem,

The glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) that he referred to is a brain growth factor. It functions like a growth-promoting fertilizer in the brain. GDNF is made by glial cells, one of the major types of cells in the brain. Fifteen percent of our brain cells are neurons; the other 85 percent are glial cells.

We have senses we don't know we have—until we lose them; balance is one that normally works so well, so seamlessly, that it is not listed among the five that Aristotle described and was overlooked for centuries afterward.

physical exercise and learning work in complementary ways: the first to make new stem cells, the second to prolong their survival.

The balance system gives us our sense of orientation in space. Its sense organ, the vestibular apparatus, consists of three semicircular canals in the inner ear that tell us when we are upright and how gravity is affecting our bodies by detecting motion in three-dimensional space. One canal detects movement in the horizontal plane, another in the vertical plane, and another when we are moving forward or backward.

Not only does the brain send signals to the body to influence it; the body sends signals to the brain to affect it as well, and thus there is constant, two-way communication between them. The body abounds with neurons, the gut alone having 100 million. Only in anatomy textbooks is the brain isolated from the body and confined to the head.

It makes good biological sense for this "machinery" always to be on because babies can't possibly know what will be important in life, so they pay attention to everything.

But brain maps for the fingers, often used in precise ways, are huge.

had shown that patients who had been paralyzed for twenty years were capable of making late recoveries with brain-stimulating exercises.

Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by 'talking to neurons,' and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind' who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

Then in 1998, two reseachers, Frederick "Rusty" Gage, an American, and Peter Eriksson, of Sweden, discovered such new cells in the human hippocampus. (This discovery is described in detail in Chapter 10 of The Brain That Changes Itself.)

Thus he might start working on a part of the body farthest from where the pupil thought the problem was, often on the opposite side. He might begin to gently move a toe, far from a painful upper body part. If he felt a restriction, he would never force it. What he discovered was that the brain would sense this relaxation in the toe, and the person would become immersed in that image of relaxed movement, which would soon generalize, so that that entire side of the body relaxed.

Sharpen Perception and Memory, Increase Speed of Thought, and Heal Learning Problems

Because the plastic brain can always allow brain functions that it has brought together to separate, a regression to barbarism is always possible, and civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.

A quantitative EEG (QEEG) is a test that can indicate if a patient has a "noisy brain." This study is often done by advanced neurofeedback practitioners, and must be interpreted by an expert who has actually met with the patient, not simply run the information through a machine.

One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior—surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century. In

Both methods develop increased awareness that can lead to neural changes and neurodifferentiation. (Put differently, when Feldenkrais trained his pupils to refine their sensory awareness of how it felt to perform a movement, he was training them to make more use of the feedback provided by their senses.) Some introductory books on

THE SECOND SPEAKER, ANITA SALTMARCHE, focused specifically on studies of light therapy used for traumatic brain injury, stroke, and depression.

We detect mistakes with our orbital frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes. Scans show that the more obsessive a person is, the more activated the orbital frontal cortex is.