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.
Interpretation
Worrying is a natural result of our intelligence, as it allows us to foresee potential problems.
In this quote, Norman Doidge highlights the dual nature of intelligence, which empowers us to think critically and creatively, while simultaneously making us prone to worry about the future. Our ability to anticipate outcomes, both positive and negative, stems from our cognitive capabilities, drawing attention to the fact that worry is not just a burden but also an integral part of being an intelligent human.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a mental health seminar to discuss the nature of worry and its relationship with intelligence.
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.
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.
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)
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.
In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it's often more difficult to repress the emotional component.
Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.
There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries.
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