From my PhD time, I have had a long-standing interest in unaided repair of the central nervous system in salamanders and fishes for two main reasons - to glean mechanisms for repair in mammals and also to understand the power of neural circuits for self-organisation and self-repair from an evolutionary perspective. I have learned that an injury to the optic nerve or motor system is repaired in salamanders and fishes without any intervention and with an apparently full return of function - vision and movement. I have dedicated my research to understanding the dynamic interactions of cells and signals that make this remarkable repair possible. We discovered mechanisms that recapitulate development and those that are dormant in development and only reactivated after injury. Modern techniques, such as single cell transcriptomics and highly specific inactivation of cell types will allow us to fully understand the evolutionary principles functional self-repair in the central nervous system in non-mammalian vertebrates and hopefully overcome the block of repair in mammals in the future.