Цитаты из книги The Brain That Changes Itself

At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect. Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent. The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that "program" movements. During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscles are contracted.

A. came into psychoanalysis. Early on we sorted out why love and aggression had fused, tracing the roots of his brain trap to his experience with his drunken mother who often gave free rein to sexual and violent feelings simultaneously. But when he still couldn't change what attracted him, I did something similar to what Merzenich and Byl do to redifferentiate maps. For a long period in the therapy, whenever A. expressed any kind of physical tenderness outside the sexual arena untainted by aggression, I pointed it out and asked him to observe it closely, reminding him that he was capable of a positive feeling and capable of intimacy.

When violent thoughts came up, I got him to search his experience to find even a single instance in which aggression or violence was untainted with sex or was even praiseworthy, as in justified self-defense. Whenever these areas came up — a pure physical tenderness, or aggression that wasn't destructive — I drew his attention to them. As time passed, he was able to form two different brain maps, one for physical tenderness, which had nothing to do with the seductiveness he experienced with his mother, and another for aggression-including healthy assertiveness — which was quite different from the senseless violence he'd experienced when his mother was drunk.

Children are born helpless and will, in the critical period of sexual plasticity, do anything to avoid abandonment and to stay attached to adults, even if they must learn to love the pain and trauma that adults inflict. The adults in little Bob's world inflicted pain on him "for his own good." Now, by becoming a supermasochist, he ironically treats pain as though it is good for him. He is utterly aware that he is stuck in the past, reliving infancy, and says he hurts himself "because I am a big baby, and I want to stay that way." Perhaps the fantasy of staying the tortured baby is an imaginary way of keeping himself from the death that awaits him should he allow himself to grow up.

In the film Sheree uses Bob, with his consent, as her slave. She humiliates him, cuts into the skin near his nipples with an X-Acto knife, puts damps on his nipples, force-feeds him, chokes him with a cord till he turns blue, forces a large steel ball — as big as a billiard ball — into his anus, and puts needles in his erogenous zones. His mouth and lips are sutured shut with stitches. He writes of drinking Sheree's urine from a baby bottle. We see him with feces on his penis. His every orifice is invaded or defiled, These activities give Bob erections and lead to great orgasms in the sex that often follows

When a person gets high on cocaine, becomes manic, or falls in love, he enters an enthusiastic state and is optimistic about everything, because all three conditions lower the firing threshold for the appetitive pleasure system, the dopaminebased system associated with the pleasure of anticipating something we desire. The addict, the manic, and the lover are increasingly filled with hopeful anticipation and are sensitive to anything that might give pleasure — flowers and fresh air inspire them, and a slight but thoughtful gesture makes them delight in all mankind.

But in fact the content of pornography is a dynamic phenomenon that perfectly illustrates the progress of an acquired taste. Thirty years ago ‘hardcore’ pornography usually meant the explicit depiction of sexual intercourse between two aroused partners, displaying their genitals. ‘Softcore’ meant pictures of women, mostly, on a bed, at their toilette, or in some semiromantic setting, in various states of undress, breasts revealed.

Now hardcore has evolved and is increasingly dominated by the sadomasochistic themes of forced sex, ejaculations on women’s faces, and angry anal sex, all involving scripts fusing sex with hatred and humiliation. Hardcore pornography now explores the world of perversion, while softcore is now what hardcore was a few decades ago, explicit sexual intercourse between adults, now available on cable TV. The comparatively tame softcore pictures of yesteryear–women in various states of undress-now show up on mainstream media all day long, in the pornification of everything, including television, rock videos, soap operas, advertisements, and so on.

Competitive plasticity in adults even explains some of our limitations. Think of the difficulty most adults have in learning a second language. The conventional view now is that the difficulty arises because the critical period for language learning has ended, leaving us with a brain too rigid to change its structure on a large scale. But the discovery of competitive plasticity suggests there is more to it. As we age, the more we use our native language, the more it comes to dominate our linguistic map space. Thus it is also because our brain is plastic — and because plasticity is competitive — that it is so hard to learn a new language and end the tyranny of the mother tongue.

Телевидение, музыкальные клипы и видеоигры, все без исключения использующие телевизионные технологии, "разворачиваются" с гораздо большей скоростью, чем реальная жизнь, и доставляются все быстрее, в результате чего у людей формируется повышенная потребность в высокоскоростном получении информации через эти средства передачи. <...>более медленные "темпы жизни" начинают казаться нам скучными. За это мы расплачиваемся тем, что нам становится все сложнее заставить себя читать, подолгу беседовать с людьми, слушать лекции.