Michael Merzenich 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.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

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.

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.

Sometimes a little brain damage can help.

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.

You can lead your brain and inspire it. You can actively shape new neural pathways.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

It is hard to teach an old dog tricks.

To build and strengthen new connections, the brain needs the challenge of fresh and unusual stimuli. .... There's a lot of evidence to suggest that repetition is bad for brain health, and novelty is good.