Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up.

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck

Two brains are better than one. You've twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge.

Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn't the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.

If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into.

We don't have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains.

As we get older it is our short term memory that fades rather than our long term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.I worry though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war, and atrocity