There is
an endless war of nerves going on inside each of our brains.
In order
to keep the brain fit, we must learn something new, rather than simply
replaying already-mastered skills.
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.
As
phantoms show, we don’t need a body part or even pain receptors to feel
pain. We need only a body image,
produced by our brain maps.
If an arm
can exist after being removed, so then might the whole person exist after the
annihilation of the body.
We grieve
by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go.
Most of
us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in
it. When we try to break a bad habit, we
think the solution is to put something new into the container. But when we learn a bad habit, it takes over
a brain map, and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of that map and
prevents the use of that space for “good” habits.
Songbirds
sing new songs each season.
