We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
Interpretation
Continuous learning is essential for a fulfilling life and love; stagnation leads to restlessness.
In this quote, Norman Doidge emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning as a fundamental aspect of feeling truly alive. He suggests that when our experiences, whether in life or love, become too predictable and devoid of new lessons, we may feel a sense of restlessness, indicating that our minds are no longer being challenged or stimulated, which is essential for our growth and well-being.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the importance of continuous education.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities . . . than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.
I believe there should be breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack, all for free and for every child that goes to school. And all food that is good, clean and fair.
Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death.
Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.
It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
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