Jeffrey M. Schwartz > Quotes

“almost automatic response: “That’s just a senseless obsession. It’s a false message. I’m going to focus my attention on something else.” At this point, the automatic transmission in your brain begins to start working properly again.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. —ARISTOTLE”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“we cannot know what really happens, but only what we observe to happen.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Psychologist and mindfulness expert David Richo, Ph.D., has focused on how these healthy connections are formed and what is needed to keep them alive. He describes the “5 A’s” as the qualities and gifts we all naturally seek out from the important people in our lives, including family, friends, and especially partners. What are these 5 A’s? • Attention—genuine interest in you, what you like and dislike, what inspires and motivates you without being overbearing or intrusive. You experience being heard and noticed. • Acceptance—genuinely embracing your interests, desires, activities, and preferences as they are without trying to alter or change them in any way. • Affection—physical comforting as well as compassion. • Appreciation—encouragement and gratitude for who you are, as you are. • Allowing—it is safe to be yourself and express all that you feel, even if it is not entirely polite or socially acceptable. What Richo is describing, in essence, are those genuine needs we have that form the basis of secure, healthy relationships. The 5 A’s are what we all should have received most of the time from our caregivers when we were growing up. They are also what we want in our adult relationships today. In his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships, Richo compares and contrasts the 5 A’s with what happens in unhealthy or unequal relationships.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“The experience of learning how to Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, and Revalue was eye-opening for them because it allowed them to see that their time could be better spent on other pursuits and in healthier ways.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“THE FOUR STEPS Step 1: Relabel—Identify your deceptive brain messages and the uncomfortable sensations; call them what they really are.   Step 2: Reframe—Change your perception of the importance of the deceptive brain messages; say why these thoughts, urges, and impulses keep bothering you: They are false brain messages (It’s not ME, it’s just my BRAIN!).   Step 3: Refocus—Direct your attention toward an activity or mental process that is wholesome and productive—even while the false and deceptive urges, thoughts, impulses, and sensations are still present and bothering you.   Step 4: Revalue—Clearly see the thoughts, urges, and impulses for what they are, simply sensations caused by deceptive brain messages that are not true and that have little to no value (they are something to dismiss, not focus on).”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“[T]here is no stronger influence on human values than man's belief about his relationship to the power that shapes the universe. When medieval science connected man directly to his Creator, man saw himself as a child of the divine imbued with a will free to choose between the good and evil. When the scientific revolution converted human beings from the sparks of divine creation into not particularly special cogs in a giant impersonal machine, it eroded any rational basis for the notion of responsibility for one's actions.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain-footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken. This is neuroplasticity. As Mike Merzenich asserted, the mechanisms of neuroplasticity "account for cortical contributions to our idiosyncratic behavioral abilities and, in extension, for the geniuses, the fools, and the idiot savants among us.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“By exerting its will, Descartes declared, the immaterial human mind could cause the material human machine to move. This bears repeating, for it is an idea that, more than any other, has thrown a stumbling block across the path of philosophers who have attempted to argue that the mind is immaterial: for how could something immaterial act efficaciously on something as fully tangible as a body? Immaterial mental substance is so ontologically different-that is, such a different sort of thing-from the body it affects that getting the twain to meet has been exceedingly difficult. To be sure, Descartes tried. He argued that the mental substance of the mind interacts with the matter of the brain through the pineal gland, the organ he believed was moved directly by the human soul. The interaction allowed the material brain to be physically directed by the immaterial mind through what Descartes called "animal spirits"-basically a kind of hydraulic fluid.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Again as during fetal development, synapses that underlie cognitive and other abilities stick around if they’re used but wither if they’re not. The systematic elimination of unused synapses, and thus unused circuits, presumably results in greater efficiency for the neural networks that are stimulated—the networks that support, in other words, behaviors in which the adolescent is actively engaged. Just as early childhood seems to be a time of exquisite sensitivity to the environment (remember the babies who dedicate auditory circuits only to the sounds of their native language, eliminating those for phonemes that they do not hear), so may adolescence. The teen years are, then, a second chance to consolidate circuits that are used and prune back those that are not—to hard-wire an ability to hit a curve ball, juggle numbers mentally, or turn musical notation into finger movements almost unconsciously. Says Giedd, “Teens have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t, [by] whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“It’s like one obsession propels another that propels another.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior

“Charles Sherrington, the founder of modern neurophysiology, contended in 1947 that brain processes alone cannot account for the full range of subjective mental phenomena, including conscious free will. "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only," he wrote.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Consciousness is more than perceiving and knowing; it is knowing that you know.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture.
Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of the mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of brain does not exist.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“One of Sherrington's greatest pupils, Sir John Eccles, held similar views. Eccles won a Nobel Prize for his seminal contributions to our understanding of how nerve cells communicate across synapses, or nerve junctions. In his later years, he worked toward a deeper understanding of the mechanisms mediating the interaction of mind and brain-including the elusive notion of free will. Standard neurobiology tells us that tiny vesicles in the nerve endings contain chemicals called neurotransmitters; in response to an electrical impulse, some of the vesicles release their contents, which cross the synapse and transmit the impulse to the adjoining neuron. In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behavior, or at least a propensity toward a behavior, seemed to deal another blow to the notion of an efficacious will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Avoidance itself is a compulsion.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior

“The more often you act in these unhealthy ways, the more you teach your brain that what is simply a habit (a learned behavior) is essential to your survival.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“your mind is your biggest ally. It gives you the capacity to choose where to focus your attention so that your actions align with your true self. As you’ve seen from the stories we’ve shared with you, recruiting and directing the mind is difficult, especially when you are dealing with anxiety, depression, addiction, or unhealthy habits. Why is it so hard to engage your mind and overcome the habits fueled by deceptive brain messages? The answer lies in your brain—in the way it is wired and how it functions.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“When I endeavor to examine my own conduct…I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator…. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavoring to form some opinion. It was in this way, Smith concluded, that “we suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour.” The change of perspective accomplished by the impartial spectator is far from easy, however: Smith clearly recognized the “fatiguing exertions” it required.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“OCD is insatiable.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior

“In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“But although experience molds the brain, it molds only an attending brain. “Passive, unattended, or little-attended exercises are of limited value for driving” neuroplasticity, Merzenich and Jenkins concluded. “Plastic changes in brain representations are generated only when behaviors are specifically attended.” And therein lies the key. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention. Paying attention matters. It matters not only for the size of the brain’s representation of this or that part of the body’s surface, of this or that muscle. It matters for the dynamic structure of the very circuits of the brain and for the brain’s ability to remake itself. This would be the next frontier for neuroplasticity, harnessing the transforming power of mind to reshape the brain.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The basic principles of evolutionary biology would seem to dictate that any natural phenomenon as prominent in our lives as our experience of consciousness must necessarily have some discernible and quantifiable effect in order for it to exist, and to persist, in nature at all. It must, in other words, confer some selective advantage. And that raises an obvious question: What possible selective advantage could consciousness offer if it is only a functionless phantasm? How could consciousness ever have evolved in the first place if, in and of itself, it does nothing? Why, in short, did nature bother to produce beings capable of self-awareness and subjective inner experience? True, evolutionary biologists can trot out many examples of traits that have been carried along on the river of evolution although not specifically selected for (the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called such traits spandrels, the architectural term for the elements between the exterior curve of an arch and the right angle of the walls around it, which were not intentionally built but were instead formed by two architectural traits that were "selected for"). But consciousness seems like an awfully prominent trait not to have been the target of some selection pressure. As James put it, "The conclusion that [consciousness] is useful is...quite justifiable. But if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“If there is a single fundamental underpinning in the intellectual tradition of Western scientific thought, it is arguably that there exists an unbridgeable divide between the world of mind and the world of matter, between the realm of the material (which is definitely real) and the realm of the immaterial (which, according to the conventions of science, is likely illusory).”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The plasticity of the motor cortex might even underlie something so common, unremarkable, and seemingly inevitable as the tentative gait that many elderly people adopt. With age, walking becomes more fraught with the risk of a spill, so many people begin to walk in an ever-more constrained way. Old people become erect and stiff, or stooped, using shorter steps and a slower pace. As a result, they get less “practice” at confident striding—bad idea. Because they no longer walk normally and instead “overpractice” a rigid and shuffling gait, the motor-cortex representation of fluid movement degrades, just as in monkeys that stop practicing retrieving little pellets from wells. The result: we burn a trace of the old-folks’ walk into our brain, eventually losing the ability to walk as we once did. It is the sadder facet of the neural traces burned into our brain at the beginning of life. There is, though, a bright side: there is every reason to believe that practicing normal movements with careful guided exercise may help prevent, or even reverse, the maladaptive changes.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“In constraint-induced movement therapy, stroke patients wear a sling on their good arm for approximately 90 percent of waking hours for fourteen straight days. On ten of those days, they receive six hours of therapy, using their seemingly useless arm: they eat lunch, throw a ball, play dominoes or cards or Chinese checkers, write, push a broom, and use standard rehab equipment called dexterity boards. “It is fairly contrary to what is typically done with stroke patients,” says Taub, “which is to do some rehabilitation with the affected arm and then, after three or four months, train the unaffected arm to do the work of both arms.” Instead, for an intense six hours daily, the patient works closely with therapists to master basic but crucial movements with the affected arm. Sitting across a pegboard from the rehab specialist, for instance, the patient grasps a peg and labors to put it into a hole. It is excruciating to watch, the patient struggling with an arm that seems deaf to the brain’s commands to extend far enough to pick up the peg; to hold it tightly enough to keep it from falling back; to retract toward the target hole; and to aim precisely enough to get the peg in. The therapist offers encouragement at every step, tailoring the task to make it more attainable if a patient is failing, then more challenging once the patient makes progress. The reward for inserting a peg is, of course, doing it again—and again and again. If the patient cannot perform a movement at first, the therapist literally takes him by the hand, guiding the arm to the peg, to the hole—and always offering verbal kudos and encouragement for the slightest achievement. Taub explicitly told the patients, all of whose strokes were a year or more in the past, that they had the capacity for much greater use of their arm than they thought. He moved it for them and told them over and over that they would soon do the same. In just two weeks of constraint-induced movement therapy with training of the affected arm, Taub reported in 1993, patients regained significant use of a limb they thought would forever hang uselessly at their side. The patients outperformed control patients on such motor tasks as donning a sweater, unscrewing a jar cap, and picking up a bean on a spoon and lifting it to the mouth. The number of daily-living activities they could carry out one month after the start of therapy soared 97 percent. That was encouraging enough. Even more tantalizing was that these were patients who had long passed the period when the conventional rehab wisdom held that maximal recovery takes place. That, in fact, was why Taub chose to work with chronic stroke patients in the first place. According to the textbooks, whatever function a patient has regained one year after stroke is all he ever will: his range of motion will not improve for the rest of his life.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Henry Stapp. “The replacement of the ideas of classical physics by the ideas of quantum physics completely changes the complexion of the mind-brain dichotomy, of the connection between mind and brain.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force