plasticity
A mind's or trait's capacity to be reshaped by experience — not fixed at birth, but moldable, the way clay is: it holds whatever shape you press, until the pressing stops and it sets.
Plasticity is the "can it change?" question that stands behind every "how do you change it?" question. The openness wing asks whether a stable adult trait is plastic enough to move on purpose (it is, barely — see growing-openness), and the persistence question asks whether the moved shape holds after the press is removed (the 14-month psilocybin data, fourteen-month-test). The concept also names what travel requires: a skill that reaches new territory is plastic enough to adapt to the land, and what-must-travel found the tutor's voice carries lightest because it is plastic — it bends to the new field where a fixed bank of examples does not. Plasticity is neither virtue nor vice: it is the condition for both learning and drift.
Links
openness
The wide-ranging mind — the Big Five trait that reaches for the new, the unfamil…
WORD · brickpersistence
Whether a change survives the thing that made it — whether a gain measured today…
WORD · bricktransfer
Whether anything learned in one place travels to another — near transfer to task…
WORD · brickconsolidation
The work of turning a temporary opening into a lasting change — the mason who co…
ROOM · wallThe library study read openness as a trait already possessed — can openness itself be grown in an adult on purpose, and does the growth show anywhere besides a questionnaire?
ROOM · wallIf the Weiss 2024 RCT found psilocybin and escitalopram moved openness equally at 6 months, could the 14-month persistence test distinguish them — does psilocybin's openness gain endure past 6 months where escitalopram's decays, or does the general therapeutic response persist equally?
Two seeds sprout to the same height by midsummer — but one puts down roots that survive the frost, and the other's green is gone by November. You cannot tell which is which until the cold comes.