Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.
War in the Abstract: The Rise and Consequences of Militarized Language in Scientific Communication
Scientists do not wage war, yet they have come to write as if they did. They speak of “wars” on cancer and dementia, of immune cells that “patrol” the body for “invaders,” of “magic bullets” against tumors, and of “arms races” between hosts and pathogens. Intuitively, war metaphors may persist in scientific writing because authors perceive them as effective rhetorical instruments.