The Brain's Way of Healing Quotes

“Moskowitz defined chronic pain as “learned pain.” Chronic pain not only indicates illness; it is itself an illness. The body’s alarm system is stuck in the “on” position, because the person has been unable to remedy the cause of an acute pain, and the central nervous system has become damaged.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“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, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“9. Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs. Monumental gains, Feldenkrais discovered, are made not by mechanical movement but by the opposite—random movements. Children learn to roll over, crawl, sit, and walk through experimentation. Most babies learn to roll over, for instance, when they follow something with their eyes that interests them, then follow it so far that, to their surprise, they roll over.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Reduce the effort whenever possible. The use of force is the opposite of awareness; learning does not take place when we are straining. The principle should not be no pain, no gain. Rather, it should be if strain, no gain. Feldenkrais thought the use of willpower (of which he obviously had plenty) was not helpful in developing awareness.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“So many modern diseases, including heart disease, depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and all the autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus), occur in part because our body’s immune systems produce excess chronic inflammation. In chronic inflammation, the immune system stays on too long and may even begin to attack the body’s own tissues, as though they were outside invaders. The causes of chronic inflammation are many, including diet and, of course, the countless chemical toxins that become embedded in the body. Chronically inflamed bodies produce chemicals, called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to pain and inflammation.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“8. Errors are essential, and there is no right way to move, only better ways. Feldenkrais didn’t correct errors or “fix” people.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“One of the most important things Feldenkrais took from Kano and judo was the understanding of reversibility: actions, to be intelligent, must be performed in such a way that, at any given moment, they can be stopped or reversed—turned in the opposite direction. The secret was never to move—or live—compulsively. (Living or performing actions compulsively is the opposite of doing them in a differentiated way. The compulsive action, unlike the differentiated one, is always done the same way, and ironically, because so much mental effort is used, it is often performed mechanically, with little awareness.)”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“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).”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“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, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“6. Slowness of movement is the key to awareness, and awareness is the key to learning. As”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“As he analyzed the areas that fire in chronic pain, he observed that many of those areas also process thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions, and beliefs—when they are not processing pain. That observation explained why, when we are in pain, we can’t concentrate or think well; why we have sensory problems and often can’t tolerate certain sounds or light; why we can’t move more gracefully; and why we can’t control our emotions very well and become irritable and have emotional outbursts. The areas that regulate these activities have been hijacked to process the pain signal.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Serotonin, a brain neurotransmitter, is known to be low in some depressions; studies show that normal sunlight causes the body to release serotonin, which is one reason people living far from the equator feel rejuvenated and in a good mood on sunny holidays. Laser light also releases serotonin, as well as other important brain chemicals, such as endorphins, which lower pain, and acetylcholine, which is essential for learning—and which might help an injured brain relearn mental abilities that have been lost. Kahn, Naeser, and the Harvard group believe that laser light affects the cerebrospinal fluid as well. Kahn believes that the cerebral spinal fluid and the blood vessels carry the photons into the brain, where they influence the brain cells, as they might other cells. The scientific research on this pathway is in its infancy.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Wall and Melzack showed how a chronic injury not only makes the cells in the pain system fire more easily but can also cause our pain maps to enlarge their “receptive field” (the area of the body’s surface that they map for), so that we begin to feel pain over a larger area of our body’s surface. This was happening to Moskowitz, whose neck pain was spreading to both sides of his neck. Wall and Melzack also showed that as maps enlarge, pain signals in one map can “spill” into adjacent pain maps. Then we may develop referred pain, when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another, some distance away.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“NEUROFEEDBACK IS A SOPHISTICATED FORM of biofeedback and an extremely versatile treatment that is useful for many of the conditions described in this book. It has recently been recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics as a treatment for removing ADD and ADHD symptoms as effectively as medications.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“5. Differentiation is easiest to make when the stimulus is smallest. In Awareness Through Movement, Feldenkrais wrote, “If I raise an iron bar I shall not feel the difference if a fly either lights on it or leaves it. If, on the other hand I am holding a feather, I shall feel a distinct difference if the fly were to settle on it. The same applies to all the senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, heat, and cold.” If a sensory stimulus is very great (say, very loud music), we can notice a change in the level of that stimulus only if the change is quite significant. If the stimulus is small to begin with, then we can detect very small changes. (This phenomenon is called the Weber-Fechner law in physiology.)”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“4. Differentiation—making the smallest possible sensory distinctions between movements—builds brain maps. Newborns, Feldenkrais observed, often make very large, poorly differentiated movements based on primitive reflexes, using many muscles at once, such as reflexively extending their entire arms. They also cannot discriminate among their fingers. As they mature, they learn to make smaller, more precise individual movements. But the movements do not become precise until the child can use awareness to discern very small differences among them. Differentiation, Feldenkrais would”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“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, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Daniel Levitin is one of the world’s leading experts on how music influences the brain. He would be appearing with the conductor Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, which would play Beethoven. Levitin would explain how the music was affecting the audience’s collective brain. Levitin was no disinterested academic. He had had a serious career as a musician, performing with Sting, Mel Tormé, and Blue Öyster Cult, consulting with Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, and having been recording engineer for Santana and the Grateful Dead. Then he—like Kahn—made a big switch and become a research psychologist, investigating how music interacts with the brain. He was now head of McGill University’s Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise and author of This Is Your Brain on Music.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Human beings tend to think that light-sensitive molecules exist only in the eyes, but they come in four major types: rhodopsin (in the retina, which absorbs light for vision), hemoglobin (in red blood cells), myoglobin (in muscle), and most important of all, cytochrome (in all the cells). Cytochrome is the marvel that explains how lasers can heal so many different conditions, because it converts light energy from the sun into energy for the cells. Most of the photons are absorbed by the energy powerhouses within the cells, the mitochondria.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“We also know that the placebo response has an evil twin, the “nocebo” response: if you lower a patient’s expectations of a treatment, the symptoms often worsen, regardless of what is in the pill. Delivering a prognosis is not just passing on information; telling someone how you believe he will do becomes a part (even if a modest part) of the treatment itself.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“bud. But putting up with some pain, while trying to distract oneself with work, is not an intense enough focus to break the stranglehold of chronic pain. Research on neuroplasticity shows that intense focus is generally required to alter the circuits and make new connections. So casual distraction must be resisted, because it allows the pain to run unopposed. Thus, even if the pain seems mild, letting it go unopposed may mean it gets stronger next time. Relentlessness means: every time pain is detected, push back, with full focus, and with the specific intention of rewiring the brain back to what it was before the chronic pain began. No exceptions. No negotiations with pain.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Intention is a subtle concept. The immediate intention is not to get rid of pain—it is to focus the mind, in order to change the brain. Thinking that the immediate reward will be pain reduction will make it hard to get there, because that reward comes slowly. In the early stages what counts is the mental effort to change. These mental efforts help build new circuits and weaken the pain networks. The initial reward, after an episode, is being able to say, “I got a pain attack and used it as an opportunity to exercise mental effort and develop new connections in my brain, which will help in the long run,” rather than “I got a pain attack, I tried to get rid of it, but am still in pain.” Moskowitz writes, in his patient handout: “If focus is merely on immediate pain control, positive results will be fleeting and frustrating. Immediate pain control is definitely part of the program, but the real reward is to disconnect excessively wired pain networks and to restore more balanced brain function in these pain processing regions of the brain.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“ON DISCOVERIES Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world. Chasidic saying, eighteenth century”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Not only does the brain send signals to the body to influence it; the body sends signals to the brain to affect it as well, and thus there is constant, two-way communication between them. The body abounds with neurons, the gut alone having 100 million. Only in anatomy textbooks is the brain isolated from the body and confined to the head.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“The rhythm of the chant often corresponds to the respiration of a calm, unstressed person, and it has an immediate calming effect—probably by entrainment. Entrainment is a process in which one rhythmic frequency influences another, until they synchronize, or approach synchronization, or have a strong influence on each other. In a somewhat different way, waves of water influence one another when they intersect.*”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“One of the neuroplasticians I described in The Brain That Changes Itself, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, who had healed her many learning disorders with brain exercises, also visited Kahn. As a younger woman, she had had severe endometriosis, a condition in which the cells lining the womb grow elsewhere in the body; it can cause pain and bleeding and rendered Barbara unable to have children. Multiple surgeries for it led to the development of tremendous scarring inside her abdomen, called postsurgical adhesions.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“Understanding this is more crucial than ever, because so many people live sedentary lives, in front of computer screens, sitting most of the day. Numerous studies show that a sedentary lifestyle is a significant risk factor not only for heart disease but also for cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative illness. If there’s a panacea in medicine, it’s walking.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“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!”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

“children learn their experience; they don’t necessarily learn what we intend them to.”)”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity