Quotes About Learning

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.

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

One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off,

6. Slowness of movement is the key to awareness, and awareness is the key to learning. As

We often praise "the ability to multitask." While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.

The neuroplastic brain evolved in ambulatory beings who ranged around the world, always having to explore unknown territories. In other words, the brain evolved to learn. As people become immobile, they see less, hear less, and process less new information, and their brains begin to atrophy from the lack of stimulation (unless they are fundamentally thinkers, and even then the neuroplastic systems require physical movement to generate new cells and nerve growth factor).

children learn their experience; they don't necessarily learn what we intend them to.")

1. The mind programs the functioning of the brain. We are born with a limited number of "hardwired" reflexes, but the human being has the "longest apprenticeship" of all animals, during which learning takes place. "Homo sapiens," he wrote, "arrives with a tremendous part of his nervous mass left unpatterned, unconnected, so that each individual, depending on where he happens to be born, can organize his brain to fit the demands of his surroundings.

We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless-a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.

Dr. Bastiaan Bloem,

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

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.

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.)

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

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

Posit Science,

I have a disdain," he says, "for complicated fancy equipment because it takes a lot of time to learn how to use, and I'm suspicious when the distance between the raw data and the final conclusion is too long. It gives you plenty of opportunity to massage that data, and human beings are notoriously susceptible to self-deception, whether scientists or not." Ramachandran

Tallal's research showed that children with language disabilities have auditory processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly and are called "the fast parts of speech." The children have trouble hearing them accurately and, as a result, reproducing them accurately.

civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

There is an art to losing, and like all art, it can be developed.

The student should master the entire work in not more than two hours.