Michael Merzenich Quotes

There is this mythology that says that when people are born, their brains are essentially fixed very early on and they're not able to change their connections. I was aware that was a myth and that people could learn new skills.

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience.

The brain is constantly adapting.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.

This world is changing enormously. In any position in a company you need to work very hard on learning new skills every day, but you also need to unlearn some of the old skills from the past.

You're not born with certain skills; you have to acquire them.

The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

A fast food job, for most people, should be an entry level position. If you see no path for advancement beyond that, it's time to take a real fast look at your human capital and learn a skill that will make you more money.

All skills are learnable.

We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

The old economy was about people acquiring a single skill for life; the new economy is about life-long learning.

I would probably never have learned to cook.

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.

If you're just letting the time pass at your job, it's just dead time and you'll never get it back. If at that job you're learning and you're observing and you're seeing about people and connections, it's suddenly alive time.

The interesting thing is that you don't have to know the answers - simply asking the questions and your reflection itself causes the rewiring of the brain.

Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.

Every new skill you learn, every adventure you go on, every new thing you try, it only makes you a better artist.