...an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a "microsurgeon of the mind" who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.
Norman DoidgeAll 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.
Norman DoidgeIronically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity.
Norman DoidgeLanguage development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a personโs ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.
Norman DoidgeAnalysis 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.
Norman Doidge