Catherine Malabou — What Should We Do with Our Brain?

193 published claims from this book.

• A brain that overrides its own determinations requires a matching non-determinist culture.
• A decentralizing brain still exercises authority and decision via momentary neuronal centers
• A fourth type of plasticity mediating neuronal and experiential selves is needed
• A fragmented brain reframes lived neurology as fragile passion, not sovereign mastery
• A nonconscious proto-self continuously maintains the body’s survival range
• Adult learning is preserved and individuated by the progressive erasure of any pre-established standard.
• Adult stem cells can transdifferentiate into cell types beyond their tissue of origin.
• Adult-brain nerve cell renewal exists but remains poorly understood regionally
• Alzheimer’s dementia is the countermodel of plasticity, an irreparable disconnection
• Bergson held the brain only routes information and never creates it
• Brain and workplace mirror each other in the figure of decentered command
• Brain cell death continues months after birth and slowly throughout adulthood
• Brain delocalization is constrained by embryonic connective organization
• Brain growth continues fifteen years after birth through self-formation
• Brain metaphors have historically been centralizing, mirroring top-down ideals of governance
• Brain plasticity describes how a genetic program executes, not against it
• Brain plasticity descriptions may either serve or resist neoliberal command.
• Brain plasticity includes a capacity to destroy form, not only create it
• Brain plasticity includes a refusal to submit to any model or form.
• Brain plasticity is a third term beyond genetic chance and necessity
• Brain plasticity is often misread as flexibility, a docility-based economy
• Brain plasticity naturalizes and thereby justifies a certain type of social and political organization.
• Brain plasticity operates across development, lifelong modulation, and repair
• Brain plasticity research has changed nothing socially or politically
• Brain science disguises ideological presuppositions that philosophers must expose
• Capitalist restructuring and neuroscience rethinks evolved in parallel.
• Chinese scientists used craniometry to claim Chinese brains outclassed European ones
• Consciousness functions like a story the brain tells about its own representing
• Consciousness works by converting stored energy into controlled releases
• Contemporary capitalism demands the same delocalized mobility it sees in the brain
• Contemporary identity is self-fashioning rather than fixed essence
• Contemporary labor demands mirror neuronal functioning, bodying forth capitalism’s current form.
• Damasio proposes a staged hierarchy from proto-self up to extended consciousness and conscience
• Darwinian views of brain imply selection oriented toward efficacy
• Depersonalized, synthetic voices can enact an escape from identity’s pressures
• Depressed superstars embody modernity’s digital pathologies from within it.
• Depression correlates with literal loss of neuronal connections
• Depression increasingly gets defined as illness, not difficulty, through biological reframing.
• Depression is a despecialization that ruptures the social bond
• Depression is reframed as a failure of flexibility, an illness of disaffiliation
• Descriptions of brain function always carry implicit political stances
• Embryonic stem cells are totipotent while adult stem cells are merely multipotent or pluripotent
• Employability demands workers mirror the net-like delocalization of neural networks
• Employability is a neo-management notion of supple adaptability
• Even neuroscience’s own descriptions can reinforce the ideological screen.
• Every brain differs by its history even when anatomy matches
• Examining neuronal-mental continuity within neuroscience can expose political assumptions and disrupt flexibility
• Explosions of rage can be legitimate resistance against a culture of docility.
• Explosive rage can oppose a culture that rewards docile flexibility
• Felt fragility fails to displace the rigid centrality metaphor of the brain
• Flexibility demands adaption to a world that lacks continuity itself.
• Flexibility functions as enforced docility within exploitative culture
• Flexibility ideology rewards docility, but plasticity enables refusal and revolt.
• Flexibility is an ideological norm that naturalizes neuronal processes to justify social functioning
• Flexibility is an ideological norm, not a neutral description
• Flexibility is an unrooted notion while plasticity is a historically grounded concept
• Flexibility is docility rebranded as adaptability, and rage is the ethical answer to it
• Flexibility is merely reproductive and normative, not creative.
• Flexibility is passivity — conciliation, not resilience
• Flexibility is plasticity stripped of its power to give and erase form
• Flexibility means instantly adapting labor and machinery to market demand
• Flexibility would mean identity changes without any critical test
• Formative change differs from continuous change by proceeding through ruptures and conflicts.
• Forming the self must be reimagined through plasticity, not flexibility or rigidity.
• Freedom depends on theorizing the plasticity of transition
• Frequent use strengthens synapses while disuse weakens them, individuating each brain.
• Hebb reframed memory circuits as plastic synapses rather than fixed reflex paths
• How a universal proto-self becomes a singular person is unknown
• Humans unknowingly make their own brain through experience
• Identity formation itself is a contradictory resilience, not harmonious maturity
• Identity formation requires both constitution and effacement of forms
• Identity forms only by struggling against its own structural self-destruction
• Ignorance of brain plasticity is a matter of consciousness, not information or popularization.
• Ignorance of brain plasticity stems from consciousness, not information shortage
• Imperial capitalism governed by dispersing local power under distant authority
• Lacking inner conflict produces exhaustion rather than neurosis
• Life’s concentrated forms carry an explosive charge through contraction
• Mechanical brain metaphors all reduce the brain to a control center
• Memory stability depends on ongoing potential destabilization of the whole
• Mental life emerges from the neuronal only through negation and conflict.
• Mental-state shifts are as real as physical reconfigurations in machines
• Mood drugs confer flexibility while bypassing the psychic cost of earning it
• Mood medications aim to restore mobility and expunge identity rigidity
• Neo-liberal capitalism decentralizes authority yet intensifies domination.
• Neural assemblies are fundamentally mobile and multifunctional across cognitive tasks
• Neural assemblies form momentary centers without any fixed command node.
• Neural fibers and synapses continue forming and rewiring until death
• Neurology cannot explain what makes mental transitions possible
• Neuronal and political command structures mirror each other’s apparent loss of center
• Neuronal functioning has become the social’s very nature, not just its metaphor
• Neuronal plasticity’s tethering of potentiation to depression lets connections transform their program.
• Neuroscience progress has spread knowledge without producing self-consciousness
• Neuroscience that skips the nature-to-culture transition is ideological, not descriptive.
• Neuroscience that skips theorizing biological-to-mental transition risks serving ideology.
• Neuroscience without a theory of transformation exposes itself to ideological co-option
• Neuroscientific brain models mirror and normalize specific political visions of democracy
• Neuroscientific discoveries have failed to transform identity or living practice
• Neuroscientific findings remain inert without a new understanding of self
• Neurosis arises from substitution itself, not from the father figure
• No one can prove all mental activity equals neuronal configuration
• No one can prove every mental activity reduces to neuronal configurations.
• No two brains have identical histories even when anatomically alike
• Outdated technological metaphors for the brain blind us to its political identity
• Philosophy about the brain wrongly reduces to reductionism versus antireductionism.
• Plastic individuals resist flexible self-modification at capital’s whims
• Plastic resilience requires colliding energies; mere flexibility is passive conciliation
• Plasticity adapts while flexibility submits, so the two are not interchangeable
• Plasticity also means the ability to change one’s own determination
• Plasticity enables neurons to change difference and transform their program
• Plasticity frames a challenge between giving form and exploding form
• Plasticity here means sculpting a genetically determined form, not flexible change
• Plasticity holds origin and self-abandonment together in one capacity
• Plasticity holds original form and full self-transformation together
• Plasticity holds together originary attachment and the capacity to abandon fixed form.
• Plasticity in mechanics means irreversible deformation, the opposite of elasticity
• Plasticity includes a closed sense of receiving a definitive, irreversible form.
• Plasticity is adaptive while flexibility is submission, not resourcefulness
• Plasticity is the exact antonym of rigidity, not its complement
• Plasticity is the organizing paradigm of contemporary neuroscience
• Plasticity is useless without grasping its political and economic implications.
• Plasticity means both receiving and giving form, unlike mere malleability
• Plasticity means formative change through rupture, not smooth continuous adaptation
• Plasticity raises whether re-formation has limits against excessive polymorphism
• Plasticity spans a graded range from determination to freedom
• Plasticity spans a spectrum from fixed form to total malleability
• Plasticity spans both taking on form and annihilating it
• Plasticity spans both the creation and the explosive annihilation of form.
• Plasticity spans closed form and open malleability, making brains self-sculpting historical structures.
• Plasticity spans from rigid determination of form to total freedom from form
• Plasticity spans the capacity to give form and to explode all form.
• Plasticity’s open sense means changing one’s form, not just receiving it.
• Plastics permanently take form and cannot regain their prior state
• Popular familiarity with brain facts does not yield self-knowledge
• Popular neuroscience’s brain-region trivia offers nothing for self-transformation
• Posing the plastic challenge means relating to one’s brain as a future world-image.
• Psychiatric diagnoses double as worries about social cohesion
• Recent neuroscience findings refute persistent but erroneous images of the brain
• Refusing flexible self-modification is what we should do with our brain
• Repeated depression physically atrophies the hippocampus and neurons
• Resilience means forming oneself out of the annihilation of form
• Resilient children self-generate their own constancy after trauma annihilates prior form
• Self-destruction at each change is what enables identity to persist
• Sensory stimuli after birth directly shape brain connection volume and maturation
• Sociopolitical changes reorganize society, not the biological brain itself
• Some scientists still deny adult brains produce new neurons
• Stem cell multipotence allows only limited differentiation
• Stroke patients can route movement through spared neural pathways by learning
• Synapses are where repeated neural activity leaves self-transforming traces
• Synaptic efficacy rises via potentiation or falls via depression in experience
• Synaptic efficacy theory explains how experience individuates each brain
• Technological metaphors misdescribe the brain as a centralized control center
• The brain always attempts post-lesion reorganization even when it fails
• The brain both receives and gives itself form through cell death
• The brain can integrate transplanted hands by modifying synaptic weights
• The brain contradicts the machine metaphor through entangled plastic processes
• The brain does not always obey itself and can produce non-pathological excess.
• The brain is an organic tension, not a model for economic organization
• The brain is its history, not merely something that has one
• The brain is not pre-made but sculpted continuously by experience
• The brain is tension and history, not a model for globalized economic organization.
• The brain represents itself to itself, against Bergson’s denial of cerebral self-representation
• The brain-consciousness identity debate is a false problem hiding real questions
• The brain-workplace analogy circulates form-taking and form-annihilation across domains
• The brain’s demonstrated plasticity coexists with a felt lack of real transformation
• The brain’s explosive excess resists self-obedience and drives formative change.
• The brain’s plasticity would scatter the mind without a self to unify its networks
• The disease-model of Alzheimer’s doubles as the social countermodel of the homeless and unemployed
• The employability ideal mirrors the polyvalent neuron’s multifunctionality
• The mind-brain relation is one of self-contradiction, not calm succession.
• The mind’s highest activity consists of neural patterns turned into mental images
• The nervous system balances self-maintenance against self-generated change.
• The nervous-system metaphor made state apparatus an interior ruling an exterior
• The neuronal and mental domains cannot be rigorously distinguished
• The neuronal-mental continuity claim is philosophical, not strictly scientific.
• The neuronal-mental continuity thesis is a philosophical stance, not a scientific postulate
• The neuronal-mental gap needs interpretation to bridge
• The neuroscience of plasticity has not made people freer or happier
• The obsolete machine metaphor of neural centrality persists despite contrary neuroscience
• The older girl’s growth becomes smooth adaptation instead of upheaval
• The plastic-brain model emerged alongside capitalism’s shift to auto-organization
• The proto-self is a nonconscious organic system maintaining bodily stability
• The self is posited to unify otherwise divergent plastic brain processes
• The self may be expected to bend to biological and cultural pressure
• The self’s dialectical contradiction has a biological foundation in the neuronal.
• The transition from universal to particular self is unexplained
• The word plasticity etymologically spans both sculpting and explosion
• Thinking brain plasticity correctly is required to think freedom
• Thought is nature negated, not an appendix of the neuronal.
• Transition from homeostasis to self-generation involves rupture, not smooth continuity
• Unchecked synaptic strengthening would saturate the hippocampus and block new learning
• Understanding plasticity’s political and economic implications precedes using it
• Without destruction of prior form, identity cannot sustain itself.
• Workplace control shifted from obedience to demands for self-directed flexibility.