Essentials: How Your Nervous System Works & Changes

There's a study published last year... that showed that 20 minutes of deep-rest, this is not deep sleep, but essentially doing something very hard and very intense and then taking 20 minutes afterward, immediately afterwards, to deliberately turn off the deliberate focused thinking and engagement actually accelerated neuroplasticity.

The sensations, the perceptions, and the thoughts and the feelings that we have in our lifespan, none of that is actually carried forward. Except the ones that we take and we convert into actions, such as writing, actions such as word, actions such as engineering new things.

The dirty secret of neuroplasticity is that no neuroplasticity occurs during the thing you're trying to learn, during the terrible event, during the great event ... All the neuroplasticity... occurs at a very different phase of life, which is when we are in sleep and non-sleep deep rest.

The way to think about how you function at every level—from the moment you're born until the day you die, everything you think and remember and feel and imagine—is that your nervous system is this continuous loop of communication between the brain, spinal cord, and body and body, spinal cord, and brain.

Perception is our ability to take what we're sensing and focus on it and make sense of it to explore it, to remember it. So, really, perceptions are just whichever sensations we happen to be paying attention to at any moment.