Regarded by some as “a conceptual event (indeed, a conceptual scandal)” ( Rees, 2010: 153), the degree to which all areas of the brain can be thought of as plastic is still contentious. Today, studies have been regarded as demonstrating neurogenesis – the growth of new neurones – in animals and adult humans (see Gage, 2002 and references therein). The idea that the developing brain in childhood is malleable or plastic has a long history within the neurosciences. The plastic brain is thus framed as a dynamic network, the very nature of which is moulded through subjective experience. Whilst scientific discourse is divergent in its deployment of ‘plasticity’, this term can be broadly understood as the potential for “changes in the input of any neural system, or in the targets or demands of its efferent connections, lead to system reorganization that might be demonstrable at the level of behavior, anatomy, and physiology and down to the cellular and molecular levels” ( Pascual-Leone et al., 2005: 377–378). Over the last decade, the concept of neuro- or brain ‘plasticity’ has become increasingly resonant in international neuroscience research.
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