Norman Doidge

Evidence suggests that unlearning existing memories is necessary to make room for new memories in our networks.

Children are born helpless and will, in the critical period of sexual plasticity, do anything to avoid abandonment and to stay attached to adults, even if they must learn to love the pain and trauma that adults inflict.

Sherrington supported the idea that all of our movement occurs in response to some stimulus and that we move, not because our brains command it, but because our spinal reflexes keep us moving. This idea was called the “reflexological theory of movement” and had come to dominate neuroscience.

Normally, when we make a mistake, three things happen. First, we get a “mistake feeling,” that nagging sense that something is wrong. Second, we become anxious, and that anxiety drives us to correct the mistake. Third, when we have corrected the mistake, an automatic gearshift in our brain allows us to move on to the next thought or activity. Then both the “mistake feeling” and the anxiety disappear.

Scans show that the more obsessive a person is, the more activated the orbital frontal cortex is.

more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it.

As the scientists randomly changed the light patterns on the computer screen and Belle’s real arm moved the joystick, so did the robotic arms, six hundred miles apart, powered only by her thoughts transmitted by computer.