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Norman Doidge Quotes

About Norman Doidge

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, researcher, author, essayist, and poet. He is on faculty at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry, and Research Faculty at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, in New York.

Norman is author of The Brain that Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing. In this fascinating book, he explores the significance of neuroplasticity, engaging the reader with stories of a miraculous recovery.

Norman Doidge Quotes

Here are Norman Doidge’s most powerful quotes:

“Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to injury.” ― Norman Doidge

“ Everything having to do with human training and education has to be re-examined in light of neuroplasticity.” ― Norman Doidge

“ Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.” ― Norman Doidge

“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 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 can shut pain off because the actual function of acute pain is not to torment us but to alert us to danger. ” ― Norman Doidge

“We see with our brains, not with our eyes,” Norman Doidge Quote

“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. ” ― Norman Doidge

“Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity.” ― Norman Doidge

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Thought changes structure… I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and trauma.” ― Norman Doidge

“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

“Awareness of movement is the key to improving movement.” ― Norman Doidge

“According to Ramachandran, pain, like the body image, is created by the brain and projected onto the body. This assertion is contrary to common sense and the traditional neurological view of pain that says that when we are hurt, our pain receptors send a one-way signal to the brain’s pain center and that the intensity of pain perceived is proportional to the seriousness of the injury.” ― Norman Doidge

“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

“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

“One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off ” ― Norman Doidge

“Given that sexuality is an instinct, and instinct is traditionally defined as a hereditary behavior unique to a species, varying little from one member to the next, the variety of our sexual tastes is curious.” ― Norman Doidge

“No other instinct can so satisfy without accomplishing its biological purpose, and no other instinct is so disconnected from its purpose.” ― Norman Doidge

“Nature has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.” ― Norman Doidge

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

“Children learn their experience; they don’t necessarily learn what we intend them to.” ― Norman Doidge

“ Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.” ― Norman Doidge Quote

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