Made Me Think

Dr. Drew Pinsky (p. 28, NYTimes magazine, 3 Jan.) on what led him to specialize in addiction rehab: “I watched these people — these young people — go from dying to better than they ever knew they could be,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Whoa.’ In medicine you go from dying to chronically ill. You don’t go from dying to better than you ever knew you could be. That just doesn’t happen.”

I think that is hopeful.

Alison Gopnik, reviewing Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, by Stanislas Dehaene: "We are born with a highly structured brain. But those brains are also transformed by our experiences, especially our early experiences. More than any other animal, we humans constantly reshape our environment. We also have an exceptionally long childhood and especially plastic young brains. Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations." (NYTimes Book Review, 3 Jan.)

I think it's obvious that different stimuli shape our brains anew. I like the old stimuli too; I love the smell of ink, the feel of fabric.

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