Plasticity and functional recovery Flashcards
What is plasticity ?
The brains ability to modify the structure and function based on experience
What is functional recovery ?
- the brains ability to recover abilities lost due to brain injury
- This is an active process and may not lead to a full recovery
- Full recovery is more likely in children
What is brain plasticity like for infants ?
- As the baby grows, the brains experiences growth in the amount of synaptic connections
- This peaks at 15,000 connections (2-3 year olds)
What is synaptic printing ?
Deletes connection that are unused and strengthens the used ones in developing infants
What was maguire’s study ? (can be used as A01 or A03)
- London taxi drivers
- They had significantly greater volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus (the part responsible for spatial and navigation skills)
- The longer that they has been a taxi driver, the more obvious the structural difference
- Plasticity therefore still occurs in adulthood
What was Draganski’s research ?
- Scanned brains of medical students three months before and after their medical exams
- Changes were sene in the posterior hippocampus and parietal cortex (This is linked to language)
- This can be used to support Maguire’s taxi study
What is Bezzola’s strength for plasticity ?
- Looked at fMRI’s in participants aged 40-60 years
- participants underwent 40 hours of training
- the control group had no training
- affected motor cortex got larger/ adapted in the experimental group
What was medina’s study about plasticity ?
- Studied the long-lasting cognitive effects of weed
- Found that lifetime use has been linked with poor cognitive function
- She also found that the use in adolescents showed subtle cognitive deficits in comparison to non-uses
- Therefore the brain has not been able to make positive adaptations
- But plasticity has still happens as the brain changed
A limitation but can be counteracted with a strength
What was Hubel and Wiesel’s study about plasticity ?
- Prevented the visual stimulation in one eye by sewing up one eye of the kitten
- The visual cortex designated to the ‘shut eye’ had started to process the info from the open eye
- When the unstitched the ye, they found the kittens had gone blind in one eye
- The kitten had adapted to the change which means that this supports plasticity
Counterpoints:
- ethics (cost vs benefit)
- generalisability to human brains
What are the 3 types of functional recovery ?
- Neuronal unmasking
- Neural re-organisation
- neural regeneration
What is neuronal unmasking ?
Dormant neurons compensate for damaged areas
What is neural re-organisation ?
Undamaged areas take on the functions of damaged areas
What is neural regeneration ?
Repairing damaged areas
Why is real-life application a strength of functional recovery ?
- By understanding research it support neuro-rehabilitation
- Things such as repetitive exercise help build stronger connections and regain function
What was Danielli’s study about functional recovery ?
- They investigated an Italian boy who had most of his left hemisphere removed at the age of 2 to remove a tumour
- With intensive therapy his right hemisphere was able to take over the left hemispheres functions such as language and speech
- This means that the brain has been able to reorganise
Strength
