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The discovery of Neuro-plasticity is the discovery that our brains can change their structure and function through mental experience alone. It signals our most important change on our understanding of the brain in 400 years, because for 400 years we thought of the brain as though it were like a machine with parts. And that view of the machine like brain, gave rise to a neurological fatalism, because it meant people who were born with brain damage or who sustained brain damage (as it developed) were condemned to live with it. Because machines do very glorious things, but they don't grow new parts and they can't re-organize themselves.