Dr. Michael Kilgard

Nice to be here.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't love the word.

Plastic makes it seem like something artificial and uninteresting.

But the idea that the brain can change is a new idea.

We used to think everything was hardwired and you are the way they are and nothing can change.

Now we know that you're making new connections every day, every time you learn something new.

And that change in our way of thinking about things has implications up and down the aisle on how we interact and everything we do.

The science of it, oh, it's so exciting.

The types of experiments that have been done, the ways that you can literally see these new connections.

Our forefathers, 100 years ago, could only look at dead tissue and imagine all the changes and excitement that was going on, Ramonica Hall and others.

But now we can real time watch these new connections and imagine that there's not

There's hundreds of them.

There's not thousands of them.

There's not millions of them.

There's not billions.

But there's trillions of new connections every second of your day are trying to decide, should I strengthen this one?

Should I weaken this one?

Or should I leave them the same?

And that idea that your brain is as active as you feel