Howard Gardner Quotes

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility

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.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

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.

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.

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

All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They're changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10.

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.

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

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.

We are natural mind changing entities until we are 10 or so. But as we get older...then it is very hard to change our minds

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.

When you repeat a new pattern often, you literally change the neural pathways in your brain. This shift helps true change settle in.

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

Whatever you train, you change your brain.

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

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'.

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

You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.