CHAPTER 1The Phenomenon of Brain Plasticity
When philosopher Catherine Malabou (2008) asks, what should we do with
our brain?, she joins a chorus trying to awaken us to the discovery of the
brain’s lifelong plasticity, its ability to change and be changed. Neuroscien-
tific ideas of brain plasticity have existed for over a century, but they were
mostly confined to the development of very young brains, to learning and
memory, and to recovery from injury. Otherwise, the human brain was, for
much of the twentieth century, understood to be biologically determined.
It seemed to be faithful to genetic blueprints, governed according to im-
mutable rules, and, after very early development, fixed for life. One can still
find many references to such a brain: in the neuroscientific literature on
sex difference, for example, which leans heavily on evolutionary logic to
explain the existence of brains that are purportedly organized as male or
female. Yet according to many interlocutors of brain science, the twenty-
first- century view is that the brain modifies itself in response to experience
throughout the lifespan. The plastic brain is ontogenetically shaped in dy-
namic relation with its environment; this means, in the language of Bergson
and Deleuze, that brains are biological becomings, always in process, always
open to transforming themselves and being transformed. Lifelong neural
plasticity may open up possibilities for agency and freedom. It may afford
what Andy Clark calls a “profoundly embodied” agency (2007, 265), one
that allows us to transform “who and what we are” (2004, 34). Malabou says
plasticity renders us “precisely in the sense of a work: sculpture, modeling,
architecture” (2008, 7). What sort of work, then, is it?