Word of the Day | plasticity
February 28th 2010 21:57
From: The New York Times
plasticity •\pla-ˈsti-sə-t 5;\• noun
1 : the property of being physically malleable; the property of something that can be worked or hammered or shaped without breaking
The word plasticity has appeared in 13 Times articles over the past year, including in the January 3, 2010 Sunday Magazine article “Listening to Braille,” on the decline in knowledge of Braille among blind Americans:
These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading — whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.
The Word of the Day and its definition have been provided by the Visual Thesaurus.
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