Plasticity And Fucntional Recovery Flashcards
Taxi driver study
Maguire et al (2000) studied 16 London taxi drivers and found that their brains showed increase in the volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus compared to a control group. This area of the brain is involved in short-term memory and spatial navigation.
What is plasticity
The brains tendency to change and adapt (functionally and physically) as a result of experience and new learning
When does the brain change
The brain changed throughout life and keeps changing until our forties
How many synaptic connections do different ages have
In infancy we have 15,000 synaptic connections which is twice as many as the adult brain
Explain functional recovery
- after trauma unaffected areas of the brain can adapt and compensate for damaged areas
- this shows neural plasticity as healthy brain areas take over functions previously controlled by now damaged of destroyed areas
- this can occur quickly (spontaneous recovery) or can take months (may need rehabilitative support)
- the brain is able to rewire and reorganize by forming new synaptic connections close to the damaged areas
- structural changes in the brain would include axonal sprouting (the growth of new nerve endings which connect with undamaged ones to create new neural pathways), reformation of blood vessels
Gabby Giffords AO1
- Gabby Giffords is a former US democratic portion who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 when she was shot in the head
- she was placed into a waking comer due to the critical nature of her condition
- however within months, after the air of physical rehabilitation, Giffords was able to walk under supersion with perfect control of her left arm and leg and was able to write with he left hand
- she could read, understand and speak in short phrases
Jodie Miller AO1
- Jodie Miller suffered from intense epileptic seizures when she was three years old
- she lost control of the left side of her body and had the right side of her brain removed to treat the seizures
- instead of loosing control of the left side of her body (cause right hemisphere gone) the left hemisphere took control over her whole body and the right side of her skull filled with cerebral spinal fluid and she had to have the right side of her brain fully removed
- she was able to function normally due to brain plasticity and recover enough to walk and mostly control the left side of her body
AO3 practically applications
- knowledge found out contributes to the field of neurorehabilitation
- spontaneous recovery appears to slow after a few weeks so rehabilitation therapy can help further recovery
AO3 negative plasticity
- One weakness of Plasticity is that Brain rewiring can be maladaptive.
- An example of this is seen in prolonged drugs users; the brain adapts to the drug use which results in lower levels of dopamine as the brain expects the person take the drugs increase the dopamine from them.
- This also leads to poorer cognitive functioning and increased risk of dementia.
- This means that the brains adaptation has had a negative effect.
- Furthermore another example of maladaptive plasticity is in Phantom Limb syndrome (when a patient feels pain in a missing body part after amputation) which can cause unpleasant and painful symptoms.
AO3 age
- functional plasticity reduces with ages as as a child you have more syntactic connections and you are always adapting and learning lots of new experiences
- however research done by Bezzola (2012) suggests otherwise
- research showed that 40 hours of gold training produced changes in neural representation of participants aged 40-60
- FMRI showed reduced motor cortex activity in novice golfers compared to control group
- which shows more efficient neural representations after training, which demonstrates that neural plasticity lasts throughout a life time
AO3 educational attainment
- Educational attainment may influence how well the brain adapts functionally after injury
- Schneider et al (2014) - more time brain injury patients spent in education (cognitive reserve) greater the chances of disability free recovery
- 769 patients, 214 DFR after one year, of these 39.2% had 16+ years in education and has DFR, only 9.7% DFR with less than 12 years
- But could be caused by other stuff: wealth, age
AO3 enviroment
_ Kempermann et al (1998) suggested enriched environments could alter the number of neurons in the brain
- he looked at rats in cages VS rats in a complex envriroment
- found rats in complex environment showed greater number of neurons in hippocampus (which is associated with memory formation)
