If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.

If you start from a position of I'm a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable.

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.

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.

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