Quotes About Neuroplasticity

REM sleep has also been shown to be particularly important for enhancing our ability to retain emotional memories and for allowing the hippocampus to turn short-term memories of the day before into long-term ones (i.e., it helps make memories more permanent, leading to structural change in the brain).

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

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).

The brain can shut pain off because the actual function of acute pain is not to torment us but to alert us to danger.

Nature has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.

When such patterns are triggered in therapy, it gives the patient a chance to look at them and change them, for as we saw in chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," positive bonds appear to facilitate neuroplastic change by triggering unlearning and dissolving existing neuronal networks, so the patient can alter his existing intentions.

Every time the brain is used, four components are triggered: motor movement, thought, sensation, and feeling. Under normal circumstances, we don't experience one without the other three.*

Moskowitz became a world leader in the use of neuroplasticity for treating pain only after making some discoveries while treating himself. A

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Posit Science,