Norman Doidge Quotes

#1. Thought changes structure ... I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and trauma.

Norman Doidge

#2. If you try to measure the future, you will never risk the present. Playing it safe. A ghastly game.

Catherine Deneuve

#3. How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.

Hesiod

#4. Not all activities are equal ... Those that involve genuine concentration - studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing - are associated with a lower risk for dementia.

Norman Doidge

#5. What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

Mahatma Gandhi

#6. 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.

Norman Doidge

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

Norman Doidge

#8. Clown cars don't work unless all the clowns are inside.

Eve Jagger

#9. 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

#10. 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.*

Norman Doidge

#11. Everything having to do with human training and education has to be re-examined in light of neuroplasticity.

Norman Doidge

#12. 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

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

Norman Doidge

#14. Mind training matters. It is not just a luxury, or a supplementary vitamin for the soul. It determines the quality of every instant of our lives.

Norman Doidge

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

Norman Doidge

#16. 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. (164)

Norman Doidge

#17. We often praise 'the ability to multi-task.' While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to aiding change in your brain maps [lasting changes].

Norman Doidge

#18. We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, they continually lead to new changes in the brain.

Norman Doidge

#19. The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.

Charles Darwin

#20. If kids stay up late, it's very bad for their brain development ... they said that on TV ... You want to become a stupid girl, Yuuki?

Matsuri Hino

#21. After the initial critical learning period of youth is over, the areas of the brain that need to be 'turned on' to allow enhanced, long lasting learning can only be activated when something important, surprising, or novel occurs, or if we make the effort to pay close attention.

Norman Doidge

#22. 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

#23. The brains of the stimulated rats had more neurotransmitters,

Norman Doidge

#24. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, Praise the eternal justice of man!

Mary Shelley

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

Norman Doidge

#26. Neuroplasticity contributes to both the constrained and unconstrained aspects of our nature. It renders our brains not only more resourceful, but also more vulnerable to outside influences.

Norman Doidge

#27. The sense that materialism has gotten out of hand is magnified by the pressures facing middle-class American families.

Robert Wuthnow

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

Norman Doidge

#29. If you find it complicated to answer someone's question, do not answer it, for his container is already full and does not have room for the answer

Ibn Arabi

#30. 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

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

Norman Doidge

#32. Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

David Bowie

#33. Because it is a 'use it or lose it' brain, when we develop a map area [in the brain], we long to keep it activated. Just as our muscles become impatient for exercise if we've been sitting all day ...

Norman Doidge

#34. He also discovered that when he touched certain parts of the brain, he triggered long-lost childhood memories or dreamlike scenes - which implied that higher mental activities were also mapped in the brain.

Norman Doidge

#35. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

Martha Stout