Quotes & Sayings About Plasticity

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. — Carl Sagan

We'd be really screwed if we had to start our life over again as children with our brains right now, because I think we lose the plasticity and flexibility. — Paul Bloom

The beauty of a language is, generally judged by its soft or rigid, melodious or harsh, ring. Other aspects, such as the flexibility of derivation, play hardly any role in grading. Were it the case, Russian would certainly be placed on the winner's stand. It would rank first in plasticity. — Kato Lomb

Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest. — Richard Powers

Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences. — Philippa Perry

Buddhism has long had a theory of what in neuroscience is called the plasticity of the brain. — Dalai Lama XIV

I kept ... returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity. — William Baziotes

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals. — David Cronenberg

The most direct evidence of the wonderful plasticity and elasticity of red corpuscles is obtained when they are watched in a current, where they can be caught against a projecting edge and bent by the pressure of the current flowing past them. — August Krogh

This sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perception of my patients and their lives. So much so, indeed, that I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of "health" and "disease," to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined "norm. — Oliver Sacks

Great ages and great individuals have arisen from the breakdown of a rigid system: the rigid system has given the necessary discipline and coherence, while its breakdown has releaed the necessary energy. ( ... ) No doubt the ideal is a certain rigidity of action plus a certain plasticity of thought, but this is diffcult to achieve in practice except during brief transitional periods. — Bertrand Russell

Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity. — Norman Doidge

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality. — Eric Kandel

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people. — Oliver Sacks

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species. — Carl Sagan

Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity. — Norman Doidge

The cognitive sophistication of a mammalian species, in fact, is nicely predicted by the extent of the convergence that occurs in its cortex-more is present in humans than in monkeys, and more in monkeys than in rats. When plasticity occurs simultaneously in two regions that fed into a convergence zone, plasticity is also likely to occur in the convergence zone since it will be the recipient of the high level of activity that occurs when plasticity is being established in the individual regions. Obviously, synchrony and modulation also influence convergence zones, further increasing their potential to integrate information across systems. — Joseph E. Ledoux

When the sunlight hit the trees, all the beauty and wonder come together. Soul unfolds its petals. Flowering and fruiting of plants starts. The birds song light up the spinal column and harmonize the hippocampal functioning. — Amit Ray

Complex training environments such as action video game play may actually foster brain plasticity and learning. — Barbara Oakley

Take hold of objects by their centres, not by their lines of contour ... The contour accentuated uniformly and beyond proportion, destroys plasticity, bringing forward those parts of an object which are always most distant from the eye - namely its outlines. — Eugene Delacroix

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. — Mohsin Hamid

The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity, and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home. — Frank Lloyd Wright

I just really love the cartoon form. I love the plasticity of it. — Roz Chast

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. (229-230) — Norman Doidge

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home. — George Santayana

Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that "plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject." In addition to being "the mechanism for development and learning," plasticity can be "a cause of pathology."35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. — Nicholas Carr

Freeman's theory helps to explain how love and plasticity affect each other. 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. — Norman Doidge

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it? — Sue Miller

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well. Remark — Albert Einstein

The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism. — William J. Brennan

The human female's sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male's. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women's sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. — Christopher Ryan

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind. — Jacob Bronowski

One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There's no motive, no separable 'will to plasticity' that's distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot's pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community. — Michael Erard

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. — Norman Doidge

phenotypic plasticity, — Edward O. Wilson

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. — Jack London

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion. — Ray Kurzweil

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, 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. — William James

If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'. — Tom Robbins

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. — Clive Barker

The viewer who sees only a study in the picture of the glass jug illuminated from behind fails to appreciate the masterly composition, the noble purity of the lines, the rich plasticity of the form and consequently also the poetry and beauty of the picture, and still more important, its specifically photographic qualities. — Alexander Rodchenko

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex — Louis Cozolino

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

No plasticity exists in the Quran. This book is believed by Muslims to be the verbatim words of God. How can you change the word of God? Other religions are living. They are changing and evolving. Islam is fossilized. It allows no change. It can't be reformed. — Ali Sina

I searched for years I found no love. I'm sure that love will never be a product of plasticity. — Frank Zappa

The brain has a quality referred to as plasticity. The ability to form new neural pathways even into very old age. The brain is fluid, flexible and incredibly adaptable to new experiences. — Deepak Chopra

The brain's plasticity is not limited to the somatosensory cortex, the area that governs our sense of touch. It's universal. Virtually all of our neural circuits - whether they're involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering - are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside. — Nicholas Carr

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. — Edith Wharton

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness - it was scarred and worn beyond repair — Andrea Lochen