Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.