## Metadata - Author: [[Norman Doidge]] - Full Title: The Brain That Changes Itself - Category: #books ## Highlights - How a sensation enters the brain is not important to Bach-y-Rita. “When a blind man uses a cane, he sweeps it back and forth, and has only one point, the tip, feeding him information through the skin receptors in the hand. Yet this sweeping allows him to sort out where the doorjamb is, or the chair, or distinguish a foot when he hits it, because it will give a little. Then he uses this information to guide himself to the chair to sit down. Though his hand sensors are where he gets the information and where the cane ‘interfaces’ with him, what he subjectively perceives is not the cane’s pressure on his hand but the layout of the room: chairs, walls, feet, the three-dimensional space. The actual receptor surface in the hand becomes merely a relay for information, a data port. The receptor surface loses its identity in the process.” ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=427)) - Recently Bach-y-Rita’s work has inspired cognitive scientist Andy Clark to wittily argue that we are “natural-born cyborgs,” meaning that brain plasticity allows us to attach ourselves to machines, such as computers and electronic tools, quite naturally. But our brains also restructure themselves in response to input from the simplest tools too, such as a blind man’s cane. ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=590)) - When we print, we make each letter separately, with just a few pen movements, which is less demanding on the brain. In cursive we write several letters at a time, and the brain must process more complex movements.) ([Location 769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=769)) - (The ability to recognize shapes depends on a brain function quite different from those functions required for drawing or seeing color; it is the same skill that allows some people to excel at games like Where’s Waldo? Women are often better at it at than men, which is why men seem to have more difficulty finding things in the refrigerator.) ([Location 798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=798)) - Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain-power unfamiliar to us now. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=814)) - Neurons that fire together wire together. ([Location 1127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1127)) - Neurons that fire apart wire apart—or Neurons out of sync fail to link. ([Location 1144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1144)) - Merzenich discovered that paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. In numerous experiments he found that lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention. When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last. We often praise “the ability to multitask.” While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn’t lead to abiding change in your brain maps. ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1204)) - One disturbing study showed that the closer children lived to the noisy airport in Frankfurt, Germany, the lower their intelligence was. A similar study, on children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, found that the closer their floor was to the highway, the lower their intelligence. So Merzenich began wondering about the role of a new environmental risk factor that might affect everyone but have a more damaging effect on genetically predisposed children: the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise. White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex. ([Location 1412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1412)) - The nucleus basalis could be turned on by an electrode, by microinjections of certain chemicals, or by drugs. It is hard to imagine that people will not—for better or for worse—be drawn to a technology that would make it relatively effortless to master the facts of science, history, or a profession, merely by being exposed to them briefly. Imagine immigrants coming to a new country, now able to pick up their new language, with ease and without an accent, in a matter of months. Imagine how the lives of older people who have been laid off from a job might be transformed, if they were able to learn a new skill with the alacrity they had in early childhood. ([Location 1447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1447)) - A major reason memory loss occurs as we age is that we have trouble registering new events in our nervous systems, because processing speed slows down, so that the accuracy, strength, and sharpness with which we perceive declines. If you can’t register something clearly, you won’t be able to remember it well. ([Location 1476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1476)) - In Elizabethan times lovers were so enamored of each other’s body odors that it was common for a woman to keep a peeled apple in her armpit until it had absorbed her sweat and smell. She would give this “love apple” to her lover to sniff at in her absence. ([Location 1696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1696)) - An addict experiences cravings because his plastic brain has become sensitized to the drug or the experience. Sensitization is different from tolerance. As tolerance develops, the addict needs more and more of a substance or porn to get a pleasant effect; as sensitization develops, he needs less and less of the substance to crave it intensely. So sensitization leads to increased wanting, though not necessarily liking. It is the accumulation of ΔFosB, caused by exposure to an addictive substance or activity, that leads to sensitization. ([Location 1790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1790)) - Pornography is more exciting than satisfying because we have two separate pleasure systems in our brains, one that has to do with exciting pleasure and one with satisfying pleasure. The exciting system relates to the “appetitive” pleasure that we get imagining something we desire, such as sex or a good meal. Its neurochemistry is largely dopamine-related, and it raises our tension level. The second pleasure system has to do with the satisfaction, or consummatory pleasure, that attends actually having sex or having that meal, a calming, fulfilling pleasure. Its neurochemistry is based on the release of endorphins, which are related to opiates and give a peaceful, euphoric bliss. ([Location 1794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1794)) - A tolerance, akin to tolerance for a drug, can develop in happy lovers as they get used to each other. Dopamine likes novelty. When monogamous mates develop a tolerance for each other and lose the romantic high they once had, the change may be a sign, not that either of them is inadequate or boring, but that their plastic brains have so well adapted to each other that it’s harder for them to get the same buzz they once got from each other. Fortunately, lovers can stimulate their dopamine, keeping the high alive, by injecting novelty into their relationship. When a couple go on a romantic vacation or try new activities together, or wear new kinds of clothing, or surprise each other, they are using novelty to turn on the pleasure centers, so that everything they experience, including each other, excites and pleases them. Once the pleasure centers are turned on and globalization begins, the new image of the beloved again becomes associated with unexpected pleasures and is plastically wired into the brain, which has evolved to respond to novelty. We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless—a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task. ([Location 1911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1911)) - Walter J. Freeman, a professor of neuroscience at Berkeley, was the first to argue that there is a connection between love and massive unlearning. He has assembled a number of compelling biological facts that point toward the conclusion that massive neuronal reorganization occurs at two life stages: when we fall in love and when we begin parenting. Freeman argues that massive plastic brain reorganization—far more massive than in normal learning or unlearning—becomes possible because of a brain neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different from neurotransmitters. While neurotransmitters are released in the synapses to excite or inhibit neurons, neuromodulators enhance or diminish the overall effectiveness of the synaptic connections and bring about enduring change. Freeman believes that when we commit in love, the brain neuromodulator oxytocin is released, allowing existing neuronal connections to melt away so that changes on a large scale can follow. Oxytocin is sometimes called the commitment neuromodulator because it reinforces bonding in mammals. It is released when lovers connect and make love—in humans oxytocin is released in both sexes during orgasm—and when couples parent and nurture their children. In women oxytocin is released during labor and breast-feeding. An fMRI study shows that when mothers look at photos of their children, brain regions rich in oxytocin are activated. In male mammals a closely related neuromodulator called vasopressin is released when they become fathers. Many young people who doubt they will be able to handle the responsibilities of parenting are not aware of the extent to which oxytocin may change their brains, allowing them to rise to the occasion. ([Location 1949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1949)) - Plasticity allows us to develop brains so unique—in response to our individual life experiences—that it is often hard to see the world as others do, to want what they want, or to cooperate. But the successful reproduction of our species requires cooperation. What nature provides, in a neuromodulator like oxytocin, is the ability for two brains in love to go through a period of heightened plasticity, allowing them to mold to each other and shape each other’s intentions and perceptions. The brain for Freeman is fundamentally an organ of socialization, and so there must be a mechanism that, from time to time, undoes our tendency to become overly individualized, overly self-involved, and too self-centered. ([Location 1984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=1984)) - Based on his work with plasticity, Taub has discovered a number of training principles: training is more effective if the skill closely relates to everyday life; training should be done in increments; and work should be concentrated into a short time, a training technique Taub calls “massed practice,” which he has found far more effective than long-term but less frequent training. ([Location 2499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=2499)) - Schwartz has found it essential to understand that it is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do. “The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling”—by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession. This technique won’t give immediate relief because lasting neuroplastic change takes time, but it does lay the groundwork for change by exercising the brain in a new way. So at first one will still feel both the urge to enact the compulsion, and the tension and anxiety that come from resisting it. The goal is to “change the channel” to some new activity for fifteen to thirty minutes when one has an OCD symptom. (If one can’t resist that long, any time spent resisting is beneficial, even if it is only for a minute. That resistance, that effort, is what appears to lay down new circuits.) ([Location 2748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=2748)) - When you time how long it takes to imagine writing your name with your “good hand,” and then actually write it, the times will be similar. When you imagine writing your name with your nondominant hand, it will take longer both to imagine it and to write it. ([Location 3240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3240)) - He found that when he blocked out all light—the road “block” had to be impermeable—the subjects’ “visual” cortices began to process the sense of touch coming from their hands, like blind patients learning Braille. What was most astounding, however, was that the brain reorganized itself in just a few days. With brain scans Pascual-Leone showed that it could take as few as two days for the “visual” cortex to begin processing tactile and auditory signals. (As well, many of the blindfolded subjects reported that as they moved, or were touched, or heard sounds, they began having visual hallucinations of beautiful, complex scenes of cities, skies, sunsets, Lilliputian figures, cartoon figures.) Absolute darkness was essential to the change because vision is so powerful a sense that if any light got in, the visual cortex preferred to process it over sound and touch. ([Location 3283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3283)) - says Pascual-Leone, “our brains are not truly organized in terms of systems that process a given sensory modality. Rather, our brain is organized in a series of specific operators.” An operator is a processor in the brain that, instead of processing input from a single sense, such as vision, touch, or hearing, processes more abstract information. One operator processes information about spatial relationships, another movement, and another shapes. Spatial relationships, movement, and shapes are information that is processed by several of our senses. We can both feel and see spatial differences—how wide a person’s hand is—as we can both feel and see movement and shapes. A few operators may be good for only a single sense (e.g., the color operator), but spatial, movement, and shape operators process signals from more than one. ([Location 3301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3301)) - What it implies is that people learning a new skill can recruit operators devoted to other activities, vastly increasing their processing power, provided they can create a roadblock between the operator they need and its usual function. Someone presented with an overwhelming auditory task, such as memorizing Homer’s Iliad, might blindfold himself to recruit operators usually devoted to sight, since the vast operators in the visual cortex can process sound. ([Location 3313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3313)) - Kandel argues that when psychotherapy changes people, “it presumably does so through learning, by producing changes in gene expression that alter the strength of synaptic connections, and structural changes that alter the anatomical pattern of interconnections between nerve cells of the brain.” Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by “talking to neurons,” and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a “microsurgeon of the mind” who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. ([Location 3425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3425)) - In 1895 Freud completed the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” one of the first comprehensive neuroscientific models to integrate brain and mind, still admired for its sophistication. Here Freud proposed the “synapse,” several years before Sir Charles Sherrington, who bears the credit. In the “Project” Freud even gave a description of how synapses, which he called “contact barriers,” might be changed by what we learn, anticipating Kandel’s work. ([Location 3459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3459)) - The first plastic concept Freud developed is the law that neurons that fire together wire together, usually called Hebb’s law, though Freud proposed it in 1888, sixty years before Hebb. Freud stated that when two neurons fire simultaneously, this firing facilitates their ongoing association. Freud emphasized that what linked neurons was their firing together in time, and he called this phenomenon the law of association by simultaneity. The law of association explains the importance of Freud’s idea of “free association,” in which psychoanalytic patients lie on the couch and “free-associate,” or say everything that comes into their minds, regardless of how uncomfortable or trivial it seems. The analyst sits behind the patient, out of the patient’s sight, and usually says little. Freud found that if he didn’t interfere, many wardedoff feelings and interesting connections emerged in the patient’s associations—thoughts and feelings the patient normally pushed away. Free association is based on the understanding that all our mental associations, even seemingly “random” ones that appear to make no sense, are expressions of links formed in our memory networks. His law of association by simultaneity implicitly links changes in neuronal networks with changes in our memory networks, so that neurons that fired together years before wired together, and these original connections are often still in place and show up in a patient’s free associations. ([Location 3463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3463)) - Freud’s second plastic idea was that of the psychological critical period and the related idea of sexual plasticity. As we saw in chapter 4, “Acquiring Tastes and Loves,” Freud was the first to argue that human sexuality and the ability to love have critical… ([Location 3474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3474)) - Freud’s third idea was a plastic view of memory. The idea Freud inherited from his teachers was that events we experience can leave permanent memory traces in our minds. But when he started working with patients, he observed that memories are not written down once, or “engraved,” to remain unchanged forever but can be altered by subsequent events and retranscribed. Freud observed that events could take on an altered… ([Location 3478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3478)) - In 1896 Freud wrote that from time to time memory traces are subjected to “a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a retranscription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over.” Memories are constantly remodeled, “analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history.” To be changed, Freud argued, memories had to be conscious and become the focus of our conscious attention, as neuroscientists have since shown. Unfortunately, as was the case… ([Location 3484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3484)) - Freud’s fourth neuroplastic idea helped explain how it might be possible to make unconscious traumatic memories conscious and retranscribe them. He observed that in the mild sensory deprivation created by his sitting out of the patients’ view, and commenting only when he had insights into their problems, patients began to regard him as they had important people in their past, usually their parents, especially in their critical psychological periods. It was as though the patients were reliving past memories without being aware of it. Freud called this unconscious phenomenon “transference” because patients were transferring scenes and ways of perceiving from the past onto the present. They were “reliving” them instead of “remembering” them. An analyst who is out of view and says little becomes a blank screen on which the patient begins to project his transference. Freud discovered that patients projected these “transferences” not only onto him but onto other people in their lives, without being aware of doing so, and that viewing others in a distorted way often got them into difficulty. Helping patients understand their transferences allowed them to improve their relationships. Most important, Freud… ([Location 3490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3490)) - A mother who is with her baby during the critical period for emotional development and attachment is constantly teaching her child what emotions are by using musical speech and nonverbal gestures. When she looks at her child who swallowed some air with her milk, she might say, “There, there, honey, you look so upset, don’t be frightened, your tummy hurts because you ate too fast. Let Mommy burp you, and give you a hug, and you’ll feel all right.” She is telling the child the name of the emotion (fright), that it has a trigger (she ate too fast), that the emotion is communicated by facial expression (“you look so upset”), that it is associated with a bodily sensation (a tummy cramp), and that turning to others for relief is often helpful (“Let Mommy burp you and give you a hug”). That mother has given her child a crash course in the many aspects of emotion conveyed not only with words but with the loving music of her voice and the reassurance of her gestures and touch. ([Location 3519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3519)) - The child who loses his mother at this young age is almost always struck two devastating blows: he loses his mother to death and the surviving parent to depression. If others cannot help him soothe himself and regulate his own emotions as his mother did, he learns to “autoregulate” by turning off his emotions. ([Location 3530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3530)) - Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to “relive” or “reenact” them, especially if they were traumatic. ([Location 3562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3562)) - One hundred and forty years ago Paul Broca opened the era of localizationism, saying, “One speaks with the left hemisphere,” and initiated not only localizationism but the related theory of “laterality,” which explored the difference between our left and right hemispheres. ([Location 3985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=3985)) - Grafman believes that in any area of the brain that performs an activity, such as storing words, it is the neurons in the center of that area that are most committed to the task. Those on the border are far less committed, so adjacent brain areas compete with each other to recruit these border neurons. Daily activities determine which brain area wins this competition. For a postal worker who looks at addresses on envelopes without thinking about their meaning, the neurons on the boundary between the visual area and the meaning area will become committed to representing the “look” of the word. For a philosopher, interested in the meaning of words, those boundary neurons will become committed to representing meaning. Grafman believes that everything we know from brain scans about these boundary areas tells us that they can expand quickly, within minutes, to respond to our moment-by-moment needs. ([Location 4222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4222)) - From his research Grafman has identified four kinds of plasticity. The first is “map expansion,” described above, which occurs largely at the boundaries between brain areas as a result of daily activity. The second is “sensory reassignment,” which occurs when one sense is blocked, as in the blind. When the visual cortex is deprived of its normal inputs, it can receive new inputs from another sense, such as touch. The third is “compensatory masquerade,” which takes advantage of the fact that there’s more than one way for your brain to approach a task. Some people use visual landmarks to get from place to place. Others with “a good sense of direction” have a strong spatial sense, so if they lose their spatial sense in a brain injury, they can fall back on landmarks. Until neuroplasticity was recognized, compensatory masquerade—also called compensation or “alternative strategies,” such as switching people with reading problems to audio tapes—was the chief method used to help children with learning disabilities. The fourth kind of plasticity is “mirror region takeover.” When part of one hemisphere fails, the mirror region in the opposite hemisphere adapts, taking over its mental function as best it can. ([Location 4228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4228)) - Grafman’s theory is that over the course of evolution the prefrontal cortex developed the ability to capture and retain information over longer and longer periods of time, allowing human beings to develop both foresight and memory. The left-frontal lobe became specialized in storing memories of individual events and the right in extracting a theme or the main point from a series of events or from a story. ([Location 4272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4272)) - We share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. The human genome project enabled scientists to determine precisely which genes differed, and it turns out that one of them is a gene that determines how many neurons we will make. Our neurons are basically identical to those of chimps and even of marine snails. In the embryo, all our neurons start from a single cell, which divides and makes two, then four, and so on. A regulatory gene determines when that process of division will stop, and it is this gene that differs between humans and chimps. ([Location 4464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4464)) - Culture can influence the development of perceptual learning because perception is not (as many assume) a passive, “bottom up” process that begins when energy in the outside world strikes the sense receptors, then passes signals to the “higher” perceptual centers in the brain. The perceiving brain is active and always adjusting itself. Seeing is as active as touching, when we run our fingers over an object to discover its texture and shape. Indeed, the stationary eye is virtually incapable of perceiving a complex object. Both our sensory and our motor cortices are always involved in perceiving. ([Location 4609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4609)) - Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message. They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them. As Just put it, “The brain constructs the message…differently for reading and listening. The pragmatic implication is that the medium is part of the message. Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper.” ([Location 4688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4688)) - Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media. It is the form of the television medium—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the “orienting response,” which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings. The orientation response evolved, no doubt, because our forebears were both predators and prey and needed to react to situations that could be dangerous or could provide sudden opportunities for such things as food or sex, or simply to novel situations. The response is physiological: the heart rate decreases for four to six seconds. Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can’t keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend. ([Location 4708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4708)) - Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and thus easily linked. Both involve the instantaneous transmission of electric signals to make linkages. Because our nervous system is plastic, it can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. Indeed, it is the nature of such systems to merge whether they are biological or man-made. The nervous system is an internal medium, communicating messages from one area of the body to another, and it evolved to do, for multicelled organisms such as ourselves, what the electronic media do for humanity—connect disparate parts. ([Location 4732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4732)) - Clearly neuroplasticity teaches that the brain is more malleable than some have thought, but to move from calling it malleable to calling it perfectible raises expectations to a dangerous level. The plastic paradox teaches that neuroplasticity can also be responsible for many rigid behaviors, and even some pathologies, along with all the potential flexibility that is within us. As the idea of plasticity becomes the focus of human attention in our time, we would be wise to remember that it is a phenomenon that produces effects we think of as both bad and good—rigidity and flexibility, vulnerability, and an unexpected resourcefulness. ([Location 4802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000QCTNIW&location=4802))