Margaret Atwood Quotes

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.

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

When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

The brain is constantly adapting.

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.

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

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.

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.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

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

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.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

I talked to a brain specialist who told me when you think like someone else for such a long time, your brain actually changes.

People's brains work differently. The brain is like a muscle and you have to train it, keep it active, keep active in races. I notice if I haven't raced for a while. It's hard to see things clearly so you have to relearn that.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

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.

Self-awareness moves us beyond the old, well-worn pathways in the brain that support fixed, unconscious habits.

The main thing I've learned is that we all have to learn to work with - and appreciate - the brain we've been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier.

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.

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

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.