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)
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.
January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.
My past is everything I failed to be.
One of the advantages of travelling the world is that you get to know the world broadly. And one of the advantages of staying in one place is that you get to know the world deeply.
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