Philippa Perry Quotes

Two brains are better than one. You’ve twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge.

Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up.

After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part.

If someone is depressed they tend to retreat within the inner circle of their comfort zone which in the longer term, may contribute to exacerbating a problem rather than soothing it and if not seeking to expand the comfort zone becomes the norm.

Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn’t the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.

If you start from a position of I’m a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable.

People tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they’ve done and climb out of it again.

In order to stretch ourselves we do need to experience the vulnerability of not knowing the outcome.

Meditators are shown to have thickening in parts of the brain structure that deal with attention, memory and sensory functions. This was found to be more noticeable in older, more practiced meditators than in younger adults which is interesting because this structure usually tends to get thinner as we age.

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck

We don’t have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains.

It seems whether we have a tendency towards being flexible or structured affects how we create, how we parent, how we work.