Neurogenesis continues throughout life and we have the capacity to establish new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones.

When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.

Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.

The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge.

Beginning a new habit, or ending an old one can feel like letting go of a rope that swings a mile above the ground. So we feel reluctant to let go, after all, we've survived so far doing what we've done, why risk it.

After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part.