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.
Interpretation
Continuous learning is essential for a fulfilling life and love; stagnation leads to restlessness.
In this quote, Norman Doidge emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning as a fundamental aspect of feeling truly alive. He suggests that when our experiences, whether in life or love, become too predictable and devoid of new lessons, we may feel a sense of restlessness, indicating that our minds are no longer being challenged or stimulated, which is essential for our growth and well-being.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the importance of continuous education.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
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. (243)
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.
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Everything we know, we learned from someone else!
I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.
I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.
He had been so busy getting away from the library, he hadn't paid attention to where he was going.
Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.
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