Oliver Sacks Quotes

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

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

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

The brain is constantly adapting.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

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.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

There is this mythology that says that when people are born, their brains are essentially fixed very early on and they're not able to change their connections. I was aware that was a myth and that people could learn new skills.

I am an apologist for the reading brain. It represents a miracle that springs from the brain's unique capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new.

When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits, and the brain adapts to it.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

Most people (by the time they have become adults ) can't change their minds because their neural pathways have become set... the longer neural pathways have been running one way the harder it is to rewire them.

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

I think the growth of the brain is a slow process. But you do change and the more you accept change and embrace change, the better.

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.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

The brain adapts very quickly. It is incredible how quickly we can adapt and what progress we can make in a very short time.

The answer is pretty clear that your intelligence can actually be changed.

The brain is a dynamic system that constantly processes and creates your reality. It works best if you balance all the things that the brain is good at. The brain is good at being adaptable, flexible, creative, and intelligent. But it's also good at playing and just being. A balanced life provides time - every day if possible - so that every function of the brain is allowed to come alive and flourish.

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

Rather marvelously, the older brain only permits change when it judges that change to be important, rewarding or good for it.