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Norman Doidge QUOTES

Norman Doidge QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

2 " Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity. "

― Norman Doidge

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

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

4 " Kandel argues that when psychotherapy changes people, 'it presumably does so through learning, by producing changes in gene expression that alter the strength of synaptic connections, and structural changes that alter the anatomical pattern of interconnections between nerve cells of the brain.' 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 psychotherpist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind' who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

5 " 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) "

― Norman Doidge

6 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

7 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

8 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

9 " 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. Increasingly the aging individual acts to preserve the structures within, and when there is a mismatch between his internal neurocognitive structures and the world, he seek to change the world. In small ways he begins to micromanage his environment, to control it, and make it familiar. But this process, writ large, often leads whole cultural groups to try to impose their view of the world on other cultures, and they often become violent, especially in the modern world, where globalization has brought different cultures closer together, exacerbating the problem. Wexler's point, then, is that much of the cross-cultural conflict we see is a product of the relative decrease in plasticity.

One could add that totalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

10 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

11 " We see with our brains, not with our eyes, "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

12 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

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

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

14 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

15 " Mr. L. did not get better all at once. He had first to experience cycles of separations, dreams, depressions, and insights—the repetition, or 'working through,' required for long-term neuroplastic change. New ways of relating had to be learned, wiring new neurons together, and old ways of responding had to be unlearned, weakening neuronal links. Because Mr. L. had linked the ideas of separation and death, they were wired together in his neuronal networks. Now that he was conscious of his association, he could unlearn it. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

16 " 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". "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

17 " 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. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

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

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

19 " One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance. "

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

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

― Norman Doidge , The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science