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Last annotated on August 10, 2011
McLuhan understood that whenever a new medium comes along, people naturally get caught up in the information—the “content”—it carries.Read more at location 113
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What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.Read more at location 126
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One of Nietzsche’s closest friends, the writer and composer Heinrich Köselitz, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power—its “iron”—was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page.Read more at location 372
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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”2Read more at location 377
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“There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse,” he said. “It may be therefore that every action leaves some permanent print upon the nervous tissue.”5Read more at location 414
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Note: We are formed by everything we do Edit
Virtually all of our neural circuits—whether they’re involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering—are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside.Read more at location 506
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THE ADULT BRAIN, it turns out, is not just plastic but, as James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, puts it, “very plastic.”16 Or, as Merzenich himself says, “massively plastic.”17Read more at location 508
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The plasticity of our synapses brings into harmony two philosophies of the mind that have for centuries stood in conflict: empiricism and rationalism.Read more at location 536
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In the view of empiricists, like John Locke, the mind we are born with is a blank slate, a “tabula rasa.” What we know comes entirely through our experiences, through what we learn as we live.Read more at location 537
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In the view of rationalists, like Immanuel Kant, we are born with built-in mental “templates” that determine how we perceive and make sense of the world.Read more at location 539
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The opposing philosophies of the empiricist and the rationalist find their common ground in the synapse.Read more at location 546
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it’s now believed that the sensations of a “phantom limb” felt by amputees are largely the result of neuroplastic changes in the brain.Read more at location 568
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Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with “each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness.”Read more at location 590
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Playing a violin, a musical tool, had resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain.Read more at location 606
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Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, Pascual-Leone mapped the brain activity of all the participants before, during, and after the test. He found that the people who had only imagined playing the notes exhibited precisely the same changes in their brains as those who had actually pressed the keys.31 Their brains had changed in response to actions that took place purely in their imagination—in response, that is, to their thoughts.Read more at location 629
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But the news is not all good. Although neuroplasticity provides an escape from genetic determinism, a loophole for free thought and free will,
pat loughery 
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