Repeated exposure converts passive receptivity into active spontaneity and discriminative power

Evidence

The disposition of a living being is constantly and repeatedly being modified to welcome and transform nature. Inherent in irritability is the same law of action and reaction, inducing receptivity to diminish and spontaneity to increase. The more these actions are repeated, the higher the level of appropriate response, the more the organism familiarizes itself with its circumstances, with that environment in which external and contingent elements ‘continuously threaten the sensitive being and surround it with danger’. … Impressions, Hegel insists, lose their force to the degree that they are reproduced. Under the action of habit, ‘immediate feeling is treated as indifferent’. From this arises the power to become ‘inured against external sensations’. Desires and impulses are ‘by the habit of their satisfaction deadened’. … What was initially only submission becomes, with repetition, the power to initiate movement. The blunting of sensation has as its correlative an increase in judgement and discrimination. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 530

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Hegelian mechanism that grounds Malabou’s plasticity — habit as the dialectical conversion of submission into initiative maps directly onto how she later reads brain plasticity as formative rather than merely receptive. — connects to: Repeated exposure makes a second sentence intrinsically more intelligible than the first; Plasticity names the unity of spontaneity and receptivity in giving and receiving form; Repeated external change becomes internal change through reversal of passivity into activity (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Core to defining plasticity via Hegel: habit is not inertia but the conversion of receptivity into spontaneity through repetition.

Broader Connections

• Repeated exposure makes a second sentence intrinsically more intelligible than the first #expands (0.85)
• Repeated external change becomes internal change through reversal of passivity into activity #corroborates (0.82)
• Plasticity names the unity of spontaneity and receptivity in giving and receiving form #qualifies (0.80)
• Repeated exposure makes false claims feel true in the gut #corroborates (0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 73
• Education automates perception-reaction links, blurring the line between passivity and activity #exemplifies (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 372