the brain that changes itself sparknotes

But prim or not, this wasn’t my main concern. I worried that this sounded somewhat prudish.

The message was that internet porn is addictive, degenerative and destroys relationships.

Now, admittedly, I can’t remember the last time I talked to one of my male friends about how long they spend looking at internet porn – but this seemed quite excessive. My concern with statistically valid results started when he was talking about internet pornography changing the structure of people’s brains to such an extent that they were existing on 2 – 3 hours sleep a night. But then he quoted an Indian doctor about the importance of individual case studies and I could see what he was doing. So much so that I was going to stop reading it and move onto something else a few times. And, potentially, I saw statistical aberrations everywhere in this book. This has made me hypersensitive to any possibility that I might be getting fooled by any statistical aberrations. I’ve also just finished Fooled By Randomness. However, in the end my response to this book has been much less black-and-white than I thought it would be. I am very fond of ‘brain’ books and prefer to believe that the mind is ‘plastic’ – that it can change itself or re-wire itself. When I saw this book initially I thought that I would have nothing but unequivocally good things to say about it. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed - people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable.

The brain that changes itself sparknotes