The property of being physically malleable

Usage examples of plasticity.

His thirteen years with the monks in Tibet had taught him much about the wonders of vampiric physiognomy, the astounding supernatural plasticity that was not at all limited to the traditional European transformational varieties of bat, wolf, and mist.

Rose, S P R Early visual experience, learning and neurochemical plasticity in the rat and the chick.

Apart from the hope that understanding biological memory will improve the design of silicon computers, or even offer the prospect of biological computers based on ensembles of neurons in culture, the biology of neural plasticity and memory is relevant across the entire human life scale, from the development of memory and learning ability in young children to the disabling deteriorations of accident, disease and later life.

Asked to predict the most likely site of synaptic plasticity, theoreticians would probably have opted for the inter-neurons, as these can clearly receive and modulate signals from many different inputs before dispatching them to varied outputs.

To unravel the dialectic between specificity and plasticity and to understand its mechanisms form some of the major tasks of modern biology.

So it turns out that to understand the mechanisms of memory, of plasticity, it is also necessary to understand the mechanisms of specificity.

Nonetheless, if in behavioural terms memory is a special case of experience, it is at least worth considering the possibility that the brain mechanisms of memory may be special cases of neural plasticity.

The plasticity means that, although individual brain neurons destroyed as a result of a stroke or brain lesion cannot regenerate, at least in adults, the cells around the damaged area do grow and put out more processes, so that there is some compensatory remoulding of the brain.

Grog does not regain plasticity and will not undergo chemical change when re-fired.

Indeed, with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young-an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains.

Whereas once biologists used to speak of organisms as the product of the interplay of nature and nurture, or, in modern language, genes and environment, today this dichotomy is recognized as simplistic, for it is an individual's genes, expressed during development, which provide the basis for both specificity and plasticity.

The range of softnesses in the forest amazed her: the green and feathery softness of the moss, the crisp softness of a liny- leafed vascular plant growing amidst the moss, the unresist- ing plasticity of a circle of slime mold.

The textures were sort of Oriental, with crisp things like water chestnuts and gummy things like sukiyaki lending variety to the crunch of lettuce and the plasticity of starches.