Neuroplasticity of the brain
Neuroplasticity of the Brain
Debbie Hampton was disappointed with her life.
She tried to commit suicide, with a overdose of drugs.
She was rushed to hospital and saved.
After she emerged from a one week coma, doctor diagnosed her with encephalopathy.
That is the general term for the brain not operating right.
She could not swallow or control her bladder.
She could not understand what she was seeing.
She could barely speak.
After a stay in a rehabilitation centre, she began to recover slowly.
But after a year the recovery plateaued.
Her speech was slow and slurred.
Her memory and thinking was unreliable.
She tried a new treatment called Neurofeedback.
She had her brain monitored while playing simple games,
controlling movements by manipulating her brain waves.
She read the book, ‘the brain that changes itself’, by Psychotherapist Norman Doidge.
She realised that neuroplasticity can change her life.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change itself in response to things,
that happen in the environment.
Our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains.
Certain exercises can actually increase our brain’s strength, size and density.
Most people think that the brain is in charge of them.
We can say that we are in charge of the brain.
For many years the consensus was that the human brain couldn’t generate new cells,
once it reached adulthood.
This was the view of the founder of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Cajal.
The psychologist Ian Robertson, in the 1980’s was working with people who had strokes.
He witnessed adults receiving occupational therapy and neuro rehabilation.
During a stroke a part of the brain is destroyed.
He wondered how, if it was partly dead, how physical therapies.
often helped to regain, some functionality.
In the 1960’s two scientists Paul Bach y Rita and Michael Merzenich,
worked on neuroplasticity.
Paul Bach worked with blind people, to help them see in a radical different way.
Rather than receiving information from the eyes,
he experimented whether they could receive information, from the vibration from the skin.
The vibrations were in accordance with the way in which an object was moving.
Congenitally blind people reported experiencing sight in three dimensions.
With the advent of brain scanning, scientists began to see evidence,
that the information seem to be processed in the visual cortex.
The hypothesis is yet to be firmly established, but it seems that the brain could rewire itself,
in a radical and useful way.
Merzenich in the 1960’s, confirmed that the brain contains maps of the body,
and the outside world.
These maps have the ability to change.
He co-developed a cochlear implant, which could help some deaf people to hear.
This relies on the principle of neuroplasticity.
The brain needs to adapt to receive auditory information from the artificial implant,
rather than the cochlear.
Merzenich and Paul Bach helped to prove that Cajal, and the scientific consensus was wrong.
The adult brain is plastic.
It could rewire itself, sometimes radically.
In 1995, neuropsychologist Thomas Elbert published his work on string players.
It showed that the maps in the brain that represented each finger with the left hand,
which was used for fingering, were enlarged.
This demonstrated that their brains had rewired themselves, as a result of many,
many hours of practice.
In 1998, Peter Eriksson published a study, which showed that creation of new cells,
or neurogenesis was possible in adults.
In 2006, Eleanor Maguire, from the University college of London,
found that the citi taxi drivers had more grey matter in one area of the hippocampus,
due to their incredible spatial knowledge of London’s maze of streets.
In 2007, Doidge published, ’The brain that changes itself’.
The power of positive thinking finally gained scientific credibility.
We now know that almost everything we do, our behaviour, thoughts and emotions,
physically change the brain chemistry or function.
Neuroplasticity is the very essence of human behaviour.
This understanding of the brain’s power, potentially opens up new techniques for treating,
an array of illnesses.
Genes have a influence on brains, along with the environmental factors.
Both nature and nurture influence the brain.
The brain can adapt in many different ways.
Neuroplasticity can refer to structural changes, such as when neurons are created,
or when synaptic connections are created.
It can also refer to functional reorganisation, such as those experienced by the blind persons,
when they were able to ‘see’ through other senses.
There are two categories of neuroplasticity.
Throughout childhood our brains undergo a phase of ‘experience-expectant’ plasticity.
They expect to learn certain important things from the environment, at certain stages.
This is how we learn to speak.
This happens till around mid 20’s.
There is experience dependent plasticity.
That is what the brain does whenever we learn something,
or whenever something changes in the environment.
Epigenetics is a new understanding of how the environment can change,
the way genes express themselves.
Neuroplasticity is still a subject of research.