Quotes About Plasticity

One of the most remarkable properties of our brain is its capacity to change and adapt to our individual world. Neurons and neural networks actually make physical changes when stimulated; this is called neuroplasticity. The way they become stimulated is through our particular experiences:

the earliest experiences have the biggest impact because that is when the brain is most rapidly growing.

Among the plastic saints of our times, Jesus has to do all the dying, and all we want to hear is another sermon about his dying.

At heart, human beings are what we may call 'generalists,' who have the ability to adapt their internal 'software programs' to different habitats or situations.

It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.

Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything.

Elasticity is a fundamental principle of perception

They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning.

Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain's weight.

He was also perpetually developing configurations of straight lines that deceive the viewer in their apparent readability as plastic forms, with walls and openings, only to become something entirely different as we look at them. Physical impossibility in the guise of the plausible was his elixir.

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.

Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances—including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.

the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.

As an actor, I do not come with preconceived notions. I am like clay that can be moulded or like a sponge that can absorb things. I do what the director wants me to do.

Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

Our brains have the ability to reorganize themselves by forming new neural connections throughout our lives. This ability is called neuroplasticity.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

Clearly—or almost clearly—the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.

Plasticity … means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matters, especially nervous tissues, seem to be endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort ...

Instead, the emerging story from cognitive neuroscience is that aging can be successful, associated with gains and losses. It is not necessarily a unidirectional process but rather a complex phenomenon characterized by reorganization, optimization and enduring functional plasticity that can enable the maintenance of a productive—and happy—life.

And in the brain, neurons that fire together quite literally wire together.