Brain Adaptability Quotes

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

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.

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 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.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

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

I guess different brains work in different ways.

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

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

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

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.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

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.