full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Michael Merzenich: Growing evidence of brain plasticity
Unscramble the Blue Letters
That's all another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments. That enmienrnvot extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brain is challenged with. Because what we've done in our personal evolutions is build up a large rrerpeitoe of specific skills and abilities that are specific to our own individual htoseiris. And in fact they result in a wonderful dteiiftfoaniren in humankind, in the way that, in fact, no two of us are quite alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine. In an adult brain of course we've built up a large repertoire of mastered silkls and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory, and that define us as acting, mnivog, tnhkiing creatures.
Open Cloze
That's all another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments. That ___________ extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brain is challenged with. Because what we've done in our personal evolutions is build up a large __________ of specific skills and abilities that are specific to our own individual _________. And in fact they result in a wonderful _______________ in humankind, in the way that, in fact, no two of us are quite alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine. In an adult brain of course we've built up a large repertoire of mastered ______ and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory, and that define us as acting, ______, ________ creatures.
Solution
- repertoire
- differentiation
- histories
- skills
- moving
- thinking
- environment
Original Text
That's all another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments. That environment extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brain is challenged with. Because what we've done in our personal evolutions is build up a large repertoire of specific skills and abilities that are specific to our own individual histories. And in fact they result in a wonderful differentiation in humankind, in the way that, in fact, no two of us are quite alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine. In an adult brain of course we've built up a large repertoire of mastered skills and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory, and that define us as acting, moving, thinking creatures.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| native language |
4 |
| language abilities |
4 |
| cortical areas |
4 |
| time constants |
3 |
| space constants |
3 |
| left side |
3 |
| control movement |
2 |
| large repertoire |
2 |
| great epoch |
2 |
| brain sets |
2 |
| older age |
2 |
| behavioral context |
2 |
| simple experiment |
2 |
| represents input |
2 |
| physical change |
2 |
| defective form |
2 |
| machine process |
2 |
| inherited faults |
2 |
| cleft palate |
2 |
| word sounds |
2 |
| abnormal neurology |
2 |
Important Words
- abilities
- acquired
- acting
- adaptability
- adaptive
- adult
- alike
- automatically
- brain
- build
- built
- challenged
- contemporary
- creatures
- culture
- define
- derive
- differentiation
- environment
- environments
- evolutions
- extends
- fact
- histories
- humankind
- individual
- large
- machine
- mastered
- memory
- moving
- perform
- personal
- plasticity
- remarkable
- repertoire
- result
- set
- shaped
- skills
- specific
- thinking
- wonderful