Anyone here well acquainted with Neuroscience?

[tnu]

I think I may need help understanding this. can somebody explain these concepts to me in layman's terms?

I was talking with a friend and he said that I lack plasticity and I have trouble releasing and imprinted thought.  What does this mean?

[MrBogosity]

You can always check the Neurologica blog for answers to things like that.

Plasticisty has to do with how the brain can change its function based on how it's used. So dancers can spin without getting dizzy: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/why-isnt-the-spinning-dancer-dizzy/
And blind people can develop echolocation: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-echolocation/

I have no idea how you could "lack plasticity," or if you could, how he could know that without a neurological examination.

A search for "imprinted thought" came up empty.

I don't know what he was trying to say to you, but I'm calling bullshit.

[evensgrey]

I doubt your friend would be able to recognize a lowered plasticity in you.  As Shane said, 'plasticity' refers to how the brain changes structurally in response to use.  Not only is this change involved in learning (and losing) skills, it is also a large part of how people regain abilities after a brain injury.  Unless you've had one recently, assessing your brain's plasticity would be very difficult.

The notion of 'imprinted thoughts' doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.  The classical example of 'imprinting' is how a newly hatched duckling will 'imprint' on the first large, moving thing it sees as it's mother and follow that object in the manner ducklings do. (This makes sense in birds, since it is very unlikely that a wild duckling will hatch with anything else large nearby and live long enough for it to matter, instead of what humans seem to do, which appears to involve instinctive recognition of faces and the like.)  Thoughts, however, are something that looks to need language acquisition before they really happen, which makes the notion of 'imprinting' them unlikely.

Your friend may be talking about something like what is called in German "Ohrwurm", or "Earworm" in English.  This is the phenomenon of a song getting 'stuck in your head' and you keep having it circulate in your mind as a recurring effect.  The tendency of different pieces of music to do this varies enormously, the tendency of people to experience this effect varies enormously, and some people experience wildly different tendencies for different pieces to do this.  (Chock that up to the differences in how different brains are wired up.)  There's no reason why other memes couldn't show similar tendencies.