How to Use plasticity in a Sentence

plasticity

noun
  • Here there were no straight lines: the plasticity of the salt caused walls to bulge, floors to hump, ceilings to bow.
    Gwyneth Cravens, WIRED, 7 Dec. 2007
  • This is a critical part of the rewiring process known as brain plasticity, which allows the mind to learn and adapt, Barrett said.
    Laura Newberrystaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb. 2023
  • Nearly equal to that was the desire to find the plasticity in language, that which can bend and flow with a character’s thoughts and feelings.
    Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2019
  • The new study, Katz said, hints that playing with this plasticity could be a way that new movement behaviors evolve.
    Quanta Magazine, 11 Mar. 2024
  • Salamanders seem to have a hold on plasticity, with the ability to morph and change very quickly.
    Sarah Jay, Discover Magazine, 6 Dec. 2021
  • The finding doesn’t just provide insights into the nature of the brain’s plasticity.
    Quanta Magazine, 30 Aug. 2021
  • The best cake cones will have a bit of tapioca flour in them, which gives a little bit of plasticity that can almost come across as staleness.
    Lucas Kwan Peterson, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2023
  • But the way in which Ford constantly deploys the plasticity of the medium for the sake of style elsewhere calls into question these vérité moments.
    Brandon Harris, The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2017
  • The past year has revealed the plasticity of our social conventions.
    New York Times, 31 Mar. 2021
  • Thus, although dreams have long been the subject of song and story, they may be better understood as the strange lovechild of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet.
    David Eagleman, Time, 29 Dec. 2020
  • From the start, the Paris agreement was designed to have the plasticity Trump seemed to be seeking by talking about some kind of renegotiation.
    Dino Grandoni, Washington Post, 2 June 2017
  • Scientists have a name for it when a person deficient in one of the five senses sees the others sharpen: cross-modal plasticity.
    Gordon Jones, New York Times, 11 May 2021
  • This vessel plasticity is the reason your face becomes flushed in the snow (and why some people encounter unwanted shrinkage in a cold pool).
    Kareem Clark, Discover Magazine, 6 Nov. 2021
  • For example, in people, too much plasticity at the wrong time is linked to brain disorders such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.
    Sarah Degenova Ackerman, The Conversation, 12 Apr. 2021
  • Sperm meets egg and a human is set up to grow, but the science shows that our environments — and the plasticity of our brains — can have a huge effect on our temperament.
    Meghan Leahy, Washington Post, 11 Nov. 2020
  • Scientists have long recognized that this plasticity is stronger in the brains of young people than those of older people.
    chicagotribune.com, 22 Aug. 2019
  • Look at the spectacle of this woman’s delusion, the series seems to say, lingering on the frozen plasticity of Jericho’s features.
    Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 28 Nov. 2019
  • McKay lands a few clean arrows in all this, not least with Rylance's spooky plasticity (the banality of evil, indeed).
    Leah Greenblatt, EW.com, 7 Dec. 2021
  • The plasticity of human beings has been of pressing concern to novelists for hundreds of years.
    New York Times, 23 Feb. 2021
  • By mimicking a minimum wage increase through tax law, the proposal is meant to point out to senators the plasticity of the budgetary rules.
    Marie Sapirie, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2021
  • One of the most remarkable features of human nature is its plasticity.
    Adrian Woolfson, Washington Post, 20 Nov. 2020
  • One of the striking indications of brain plasticity came from scanning the brain activity of people who had been blind from birth.
    Quanta Magazine, 24 Mar. 2020
  • That means before age 65, while the heart retains plasticity and the ability to remodel itself.
    Washington Post, 21 Oct. 2019
  • Much more research is needed to gain a better understanding of the balance between extra body part use, brain plasticity, and motor control of both the body and the device.
    Gary Stix, Scientific American, 19 May 2021
  • But new results suggest that that plasticity may go even deeper than scientists have thought.
    Quanta Magazine, 29 Aug. 2018
  • It’s during the first part of their life cycle that phenotypic plasticity can occur.
    Starre Vartan, National Geographic, 26 June 2019
  • Think of this synaptic plasticity as the mechanism by which the strength of information flow in these tiny gaps among brain cells is manipulated.
    Husseini Manji, Scientific American, 14 Sep. 2021
  • Brain scans showed the two-eye approach produced greater mental plasticity and overall improved vision.
    Scott Lafee, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 May 2023
  • These structures may be key to understanding neural plasticity in the human brain.
    Jennifer Leman, Scientific American, 29 July 2019
  • The period is marked by high levels of brain plasticity before neural connections become more fixed.
    Craig S. Smith, Forbes, 1 Mar. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'plasticity.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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