Quotes About Neuroplasticity

As we get older the brain actually gets smarter.

Repetition is a key principle in neuroplasticity. It's how we rewire our brains and turn good ideas into permanent new ways of being and behaving.

El neurólogo canadiense Donald Hebb hablaba de que «neuronas que disparan a la vez, acaban conectándose».

Hemos de entender que el cerebro es enormemente plástico y maleable y que la cultura en la que vivimos puede favorecer más el dominio de uno de los hemisferios o incluso favorecer que trabajen de una forma más integrada.

Once again, it is important to keep in mind that there isn't necessarily a connection between how much you are enjoying the practice and its longer-term benefits. It can take time for the mind to reconnect fully with the body as countless networks in the brain have to rewire and strengthen themselves.

we know that repeated practice changes the brain

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

neuroplasticity', a term which takes into account the fact that the brain evolves continuously in relation to our experience, and that a particular training, such as learning a musical instrument or a sport, can bring about a profound change.

Like so many other organs, the brain possesses a miraculous ability to heal itself, to forge new synaptic connections around old ones, to learn and relearn. That is, however, if you don't keep damaging it three times a day. A wholesome diet and exercise may offer your best hope for remaining sharp and healthy into your twilight years.

The Brain Sync: Improve Your Mind as You Age

We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)

Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.

The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors.

if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.

The animals' neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can't believe what he's seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he's been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

Neuroplasticity, argues Pascual-Leone, is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system "to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

The genius of our brain's construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn't.

It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.

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

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.

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

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.