Brain Plasticity And Functional Recovery Flashcards
What is brain plasticity?
The brain’s ability to modify its structure and adapt in response to experience, learning or injury
What is meant by experience in terms of brain plasticity?
Everything outside the body
When do we have the most synaptic connections and why?
During infancy, brain experiences rapid growth in number of synaptic connections
- by 2-3, have around 15k of these connections
. As we age, these neural pathways are strengthened if they are used often, but the rarely used ones are deleted
Clearly the brain is in a continual state of change throughout life
What else can brain plasticity be called?
Neuroplasticity or cortical remapping
How are neural pathways relevant in brain plasticity?
Each time you learn something new, neural pathways are formed that get weaker unless frequently used
- this is important in memory and understanding why consolidation is important
What is it called when infrequently used neural pathways eventually become deleted?
Synaptic pruning
What was the procedure of Maguire (2000)?
. Brain scans of 16 London taxi drivers
. Completion of ‘the knowledge’ places great demands in LTM as well as spatial reasoning
What were the findings of Maguire et al (2000)?
. Increased grey matter found in brains of taxi drivers compared to controls in two regions, the right and left hippocampi
. Increased volume found in the posterior hippocampus
What are some key studies in this topic?
. Maguire et al
. Schneider et al
. Elbert et al
. Medina et al (2007)
. Ladina Bezzola et al
. Danelli et al (2013)
What did Schneider et al find?
The more time brain injury patients had spent in education, indicating their ‘cognitive reserve’, the greater their chance of a disability free recovery (DFR)
. 2/5 of the patients who achieved DFR had more than 16 years in education
What is the concept of cognitive reserve?
Your brain’s ability to improvise and find alternative ways of getting a job done
What did Medina et al find?
Prolonged drug use has been shown to result in worse cognitive functioning as well as increased risk of dementia later in life.
- this shows that plasticity can be negative as bad experiences will physically affect your neural structure
How is education related to successful functional recovery?
Greater educational attainment is associated with a high ‘cognitive reserve’, which could be a factor in neural adaption during recovery from traumatic brain injury (Schneider et al)
- education helps make recovery more successful
- this has practical implications on emphasising importance of education
What is functional recovery?
After experiencing trauma to neural pathways, the brain can re-wire itself over time so that the functions lost in one area of the brain affected by the trauma can be taken over by other parts of the brain.
How is functional recovery possible?
Due to neuroplasticity, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to create new neural pathways that allow the transferring of functions
How does functional recovery occur?
Through neural unmasking - ‘dormant’ synapses open existing neural pathways to compensate for a nearby damaged area of the brain
What are the structural changes that support neural unmasking?
. Axonal sprouting
. Reformation of blood vessels
. Recruitment of homologous (similar) areas
. Denervation super-sensitivity
What is Axonal sprouting?
When new nerved endings grow and connect with undamaged areas, creating new blood vessels and pathways around the damaged area
How does reformation of blood vessels help support neural unmasking?
These new connections created through Axonal sprouting are reinforced with blood vessels
How does recruitment of homologous areas work?
To make sure that functioning isn’t completely lost by neural damage, areas that have a similar function on the opposite hemisphere will be recruited to do specific tasks
How does denervation super-sensitivity help to aid neural unmasking in functional recovery?
Axons with a similar function to the damaged ones are more aroused and so are more sensitive to input
What is the practical application of brain plasticity in functional recovery?
field of neurorehabilitation (brain can’t wholely ‘fix itself’)
- spontaneous recovery slows down after number of weeks from injury
- this means forms of physical therapy needed to maintain improved functioning e.g movement therapy to counter deficits in motor functioning after a stroke
What did Ladina Bezzola et al (2012) study into age and plasticity find?
40 hours of golf training in 40-60 year olds.
-fMRI found reduced motor cortex activity in novice golfers compared to controls, showing more efficient neural representations after training
- this is an argument for plasticity continuing through lifespan
