The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity by Dr Norman Doidge

(this is book 500!)

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

The pain perception system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and that the brain, far from being a passive recipient, controls how much pain we feel.

Chronic pain is plasticity gone wild.

When the neurons in our pain maps get damaged, they fire incessant false alarms, making us believe the problems in our body when it is mostly in our brain.  Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing. The acute pain has developed an afterlife: it becomes chronic pain.

The mind-brain-body healing process is not merely a general, non-specific process that resets the entire nervous system, the way relaxation does.  Mysteriously -- because we don't yet know the mechanism -- it targets only what the patient believes is the focus.

Exercise helps fend off degenerative disorders and can defer dementia.

Fifteen percent of our brain cells are neurons; the other 85 percent are glial cells.

Walking, so natural, so "pedestrian" (in the sense of the ordinary), may not be a high-tech neuroplastic technique, but it is one of the most powerful neuroplastic interventions.  When we walk fast, regardless of our age, we produce new cells in the hippocampus, the brain area that plays a key role in turning short-term memories into long.

Walking was a key contributor to a very simple program that reduced the risk of dementia by a staggering 60 percent.

In sleep the glia open up special channels that allow waste products and toxic buildups (including the proteins that build up in dementia) to be discharged from the brain through the cerebral spinal fluid, which bathes much of the brain.  This unique channel system is ten times more active in the sleeping brain than in the waking state. 

In China, acupuncture was routinely used to treat strokes.

When a human stands, a group of muscles --- the antigravity muscles of the back and the quadriceps -- holds a person up.

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

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.