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

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

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

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)

I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.