I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.

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.

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

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.

People tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they've done and climb out of it again.

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.

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