She seeks to improve on everyday weaknesses such as her limited attention span and tendency to worry too much. She then branches out into more mysterious areas such as creativity and the perception of time. From Boston to Oxford, England, and Philadelphia to Freiburg, Germany, Williams travels to labs or virtually meets with scientists and tries their techniques of mindfulness meditation, magnetic brain stimulation, sustained focus exercises, stress response retraining, and more.
She shares her intimate journey with readers to discover what neuroscience can really do for us. Read more Read less. Add all three to Cart Add all three to List. These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Buy the selected items together This item: Ships from and sold by Amazon.
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Neuroplasticity
The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. The War on Normal People: Here's how restrictions apply. Start reading My Plastic Brain on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 10 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Talking to experts and reading studies, Williams attempts to decrease her anxiety, become more creative, and improve her focus, spatial skills and sense of time as well as her mathematical skills. She uses various diagnostic tests and exercises based on current research to improve her skills, with varying success. I was very interested in the material but did not enjoy the style.
It was gonzo-ish science, and exemplified why science progresses using established research and statistical methods rather than anecdotal evidence. Sometimes the author doesn't seem very committed: Worse was the incessant use of the word 'like': I'm surprised an editor didn't try to change it. I appreciated the Notes section at the back but was disappointed that many studies were referred to but NOT cited in the Notes section.
Most people with even a casual interest in the brain and its functioning are aware of the new and exciting developments neuroscientists are making. Brain plasticity, fMRI imaging and pinpointing the exact area of the brain responsible for various activities are just some of the latest advances in exploring the brain. Caroline Williams, author of My Plastic Brain, embarked on a year long experiment to see if she could find a way to apply some of the newest theories to her specific situation. Said differently, is there a practical application for what the neuroscientists are learning about the brain?
Williams is a freelance science writer. She is highly qualified to undertake and report on such a study. By her own admission, she has certain areas that she would like to improve on. She was prone to be overly anxious, she rated herself as poor in math and mapping skills. Since she is a writer, she wanted to understand how to tap into her natural creativity on demand. Williams engaged with a number of scientists who were conducting research in various areas of the brain. She traveled to Boston, Kansas, Germany and Oxford to take part in a wide variety of experiments and engage in some exercises designed to improve brain functioning in her areas of interest.
A lot of people have viewed the brain as a muscle that will get stronger with focused exercise. It turns out that this is not the most productive approach. So instead of doing exercises that focused on strengthening one area, doing exercises that improved the flexibility of the brain was more helpful. A common recurring theme of the book was that it is difficult to apply the current research to a specific person. The experiments arrived at conclusions based on a large enough sample.
In a sample of one, there are too many unknowns. Her journey was interesting and insightful. She did go fairly deep into the various parts of the brain and their function. So, the book will probably be more interesting to serious students of brain science than the casual reader. She did try to lighten the book by sharing a lot of personal experiences. I enjoy pop science, in which complicated subjects are clarified - but not dumbed-down - for the lay person.
I also enjoy reading about neuroscience. But I couldn't get into this book. The introduction went on way too long, and when I got past that, I saw that reading the introduction alone was pretty much as good as reading the rest. Great inroads were made in identifying the locus of change as being at cortical synapses expressing NMDA receptors , and in implicating cholinergic inputs as necessary for normal expression. The work of Ron Frostig and Daniel Polley , identified behavioral manipulations causing a substantial impact on the cortical plasticity in that system.
Merzenich and DT Blake , , went on to use cortical implants to study the evolution of plasticity in both the somatosensory and auditory systems. Both systems show similar changes with respect to behavior.
Neuroplasticity - Wikipedia
When a stimulus becomes cognitively associated with reinforcement , its cortical representation is strengthened and enlarged. In some cases, cortical representations can increase two to threefold in 1 to 2 days when a new sensory-motor behavior is first acquired, and changes are largely finalised within at most a few weeks. Control studies show that these changes are not caused by sensory experience alone: An interesting phenomenon involving plasticity of cortical maps is the phenomenon of phantom-limb sensation. Phantom-limb sensation is experienced by people who have undergone amputations in hands, arms, and legs, but it is not limited to extremities.
Although the neurological basis of phantom-limb sensation is still not entirely understood, it is believed [ by whom? Norman Doidge , following the lead of Michael Merzenich, separates manifestations of neuroplasticity into adaptations that have positive or negative behavioral consequences. For example, if an organism can recover after a stroke to normal levels of performance, that adaptiveness could be considered an example of "positive plasticity".
Changes such as an excessive level of neuronal growth leading to spasticity or tonic paralysis , or excessive neurotransmitter release in response to injury that could result in nerve-cell death are considered as an example of "negative" plasticity. Doidge deems both drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder as examples of "negative plasticity", as the synaptic rewiring resulting in these behaviors is also highly maladaptive.
A study found that the effects of neuroplasticity occur even more rapidly than previously expected. Researchers imaged the brains of medical students during a period of their studying for exams. In a matter of months, the students' gray matter increased significantly in the posterior and lateral parietal cortex. The adult brain is not entirely "hard-wired" with fixed neuronal circuits. There are many instances of cortical and subcortical rewiring of neuronal circuits in response to training as well as in response to injury.
There is solid evidence that neurogenesis birth of brain cells occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age. There is now ample evidence [ citation needed ] for the active, experience-dependent re-organization of the synaptic networks of the brain involving multiple inter-related structures including the cerebral cortex.
The specific details of how this process occurs at the molecular and ultrastructural levels are topics of active neuroscience research. The way experience can influence the synaptic organization of the brain is also the basis for a number of theories of brain function including the general theory of mind and Neural Darwinism. The concept of neuroplasticity is also central to theories of memory and learning that are associated with experience-driven alteration of synaptic structure and function in studies of classical conditioning in invertebrate animal models such as Aplysia.
A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can be transferred to a different location; this can result from normal experience and also occurs in the process of recovery from brain injury. Neuroplasticity is the fundamental issue that supports the scientific basis for treatment of acquired brain injury with goal-directed experiential therapeutic programs in the context of rehabilitation approaches to the functional consequences of the injury.
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Neuroplasticity is gaining popularity as a theory that, at least in part, explains improvements in functional outcomes with physical therapy post-stroke. Rehabilitation techniques that are supported by evidence which suggest cortical reorganization as the mechanism of change include constraint-induced movement therapy , functional electrical stimulation , treadmill training with body-weight support, and virtual reality therapy.
Robot assisted therapy is an emerging technique, which is also hypothesized to work by way of neuroplasticity, though there is currently insufficient evidence to determine the exact mechanisms of change when using this method. One group has developed a treatment that includes increased levels of progesterone injections in brain-injured patients. For decades, researchers assumed that humans had to acquire binocular vision , in particular stereopsis , in early childhood or they would never gain it. In recent years, however, successful improvements in persons with amblyopia , convergence insufficiency or other stereo vision anomalies have become prime examples of neuroplasticity; binocular vision improvements and stereopsis recovery are now active areas of scientific and clinical research.
Several companies have offered so-called cognitive training software programs for various purposes that claim to work via neuroplasticity; one example is Fast ForWord which is marketed to help children with learning disabilities. Neuroplasticity is involved in the development of sensory function. The brain is born immature and it adapts to sensory inputs after birth. In the auditory system, congenital hearing impairment, a rather frequent inborn condition affecting 1 of newborns, has been shown to affect auditory development, and implantation of a sensory prostheses activating the auditory system has prevented the deficits and induced functional maturation of the auditory system.
Consequently, in prelingually deaf children, early cochlear implantation , as a rule, allows the children to learn the mother language and acquire acoustic communication. In the phenomenon of phantom limb sensation, a person continues to feel pain or sensation within a part of their body that has been amputated. This results in activity within the surrounding area of the cortex being misinterpreted by the area of the cortex formerly responsible for the amputated limb.
The relationship between phantom limb sensation and neuroplasticity is a complex one. In the early s V. Ramachandran theorized that phantom limbs were the result of cortical remapping. However, in Herta Flor and her colleagues demonstrated that cortical remapping occurs only in patients who have phantom pain. In Lorimer Moseley and Peter Brugger carried out a remarkable experiment in which they encouraged arm amputee subjects to use visual imagery to contort their phantom limbs into impossible configurations.
Four of the seven subjects succeeded in performing impossible movements of the phantom limb. This experiment suggests that the subjects had modified the neural representation of their phantom limbs and generated the motor commands needed to execute impossible movements in the absence of feedback from the body. Individuals who suffer from chronic pain experience prolonged pain at sites that may have been previously injured, yet are otherwise currently healthy.
This phenomenon is related to neuroplasticity due to a maladaptive reorganization of the nervous system, both peripherally and centrally. During the period of tissue damage, noxious stimuli and inflammation cause an elevation of nociceptive input from the periphery to the central nervous system. Prolonged nociception from the periphery then elicits a neuroplastic response at the cortical level to change its somatotopic organization for the painful site, inducing central sensitization.
Similar results have been reported for phantom limb pain, [37] chronic low back pain [38] and carpal tunnel syndrome. A number of studies have linked meditation practice to differences in cortical thickness or density of gray matter. His results suggest that long-term or short-term practice of meditation results in different levels of activity in brain regions associated with such qualities as attention , anxiety , depression , fear , anger , and the ability of the body to heal itself.
These functional changes may be caused by changes in the physical structure of the brain. Aerobic exercise promotes adult neurogenesis by increasing the production of neurotrophic factors compounds that promote growth or survival of neurons , such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor BDNF , insulin-like growth factor 1 IGF-1 , and vascular endothelial growth factor VEGF. Human echolocation is a learned ability for humans to sense their environment from echoes.
This ability is used by some blind people to navigate their environment and sense their surroundings in detail. Studies in [57] and [58] using functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques have shown that parts of the brain associated with visual processing are adapted for the new skill of echolocation. Studies with blind patients, for example, suggest that the click-echoes heard by these patients were processed by brain regions devoted to vision rather than audition. Reviews of MRI studies on individuals with ADHD suggest that the long-term treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD with stimulants, such as amphetamine or methylphenidate , decreases abnormalities in brain structure and function found in subjects with ADHD, and improves function in several parts of the brain, such as the right caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia.
Neuroplasticity is most active in childhood as a part of normal human development , and can also be seen as an especially important mechanism for children in terms of risk and resiliency. Trauma thus alters the brain's connections such that children who have experienced trauma may be hyper vigilant or overly aroused. In a single lifespan , individuals of an animal species may encounter various changes in brain morphology.
Many of these differences are caused by the release of hormones in the brain; others are the product of evolutionary factors or developmental stages. Changing brain behavior and morphology to suit other seasonal behaviors is relatively common in animals. Within the class Aves , black-capped chickadees experience an increase in the volume of their hippocampus and strength of neural connections to the hippocampus during fall months.
The California sea hare , a gastropod , has more successful inhibition of egg-laying hormones outside of mating season due to increased effectiveness of inhibitors in the brain. Seasonal brain variation occurs within many mammals. Part of the hypothalamus of the common ewe is more receptive to GnRH during breeding season than at other times of the year.
In the spring , both reduce in size. Randy Nudo 's group found that if a small stroke an infarction is induced by obstruction of blood flow to a portion of a monkey's motor cortex, the part of the body that responds by movement moves when areas adjacent to the damaged brain area are stimulated. In one study, intracortical microstimulation ICMS mapping techniques were used in nine normal monkeys. Some underwent ischemic-infarction procedures and the others, ICMS procedures. The monkeys with ischemic infarctions retained more finger flexion during food retrieval and after several months this deficit returned to preoperative levels.
Current research includes the tracking of changes that occur in the motor areas of the cerebral cortex as a result of a stroke. Thus, events that occur in the reorganization process of the brain can be ascertained. Nudo is also involved in studying the treatment plans that may enhance recovery from strokes, such as physiotherapy, pharmacotherapy , and electrical-stimulation therapy. Jon Kaas , a professor at Vanderbilt University , has been able to show "how somatosensory area 3b and ventroposterior VP nucleus of the thalamus are affected by longstanding unilateral dorsal-column lesions at cervical levels in macaque monkeys.
His recent research focuses on the somatosensory system, which involves a sense of the body and its movements using many senses. Usually, damage of the somatosensory cortex results in impairment of the body perception. Kaas' research project is focused on how these systems somatosensory, cognitive, motor systems respond with plastic changes resulting from injury.
One recent study of neuroplasticity involves work done by a team of doctors and researchers at Emory University , specifically Dr. Donald Stein [79] and Dr. This is the first treatment in 40 years that has significant results in treating traumatic brain injuries while also incurring no known side effects and being cheap to administer.
Stein noticed that female mice seemed to recover from brain injuries better than male mice, and that at certain points in the estrus cycle , females recovered even better. This difference may be attributed to different levels of progesterone, with higher levels of progesterone leading to the faster recovery from brain injury in mice. However, clinical trials showed progesterone offers no significant benefit for traumatic brain injury human patients.
Transcriptional profiling of the frontal cortex of persons ranging from 26 to years of age defined a set of genes with reduced expression after age 40, and especially after age Reactive oxygen species appear to have a significant role in the regulation of synaptic plasticity and cognitive function. The term "plasticity" was first applied to behavior in by William James in The Principles of Psychology. In , Italian anatomist Michele Vicenzo Malacarne described experiments in which he paired animals, trained one of the pair extensively for years, and then dissected both.
He discovered that the cerebellums of the trained animals were substantially larger. But these findings were eventually forgotten. Given the central importance of neuroplasticity, an outsider would be forgiven for assuming that it was well defined and that a basic and universal framework served to direct current and future hypotheses and experimentation. Sadly, however, this is not the case. While many neuroscientists use the word neuroplasticity as an umbrella term it means different things to different researchers in different subfields In brief, a mutually agreed upon framework does not appear to exist.
In , Karl Lashley conducted experiments on rhesus monkeys that demonstrated changes in neuronal pathways, which he concluded were evidence of plasticity. Despite this, and other research that suggested plasticity took place, neuroscientists did not widely accept the idea of neuroplasticity. In , Justo Gonzalo concluded from his research of brain dynamics, that, contrary to the activity of the projection areas , the "central" cortical mass more or less equidistant from the visual, tactile and auditive projection areas , would be a "maneuvering mass", rather unspecific or multisensory, with capacity to increase neural excitability and re-organize the activity by means of plasticity properties.
I , p Vol. Marian Diamond of the University of California, Berkeley, produced the first scientific evidence of anatomical brain plasticity, publishing her research in Other significant evidence was produced in the s and after, notably from scientists including Paul Bach-y-Rita , Michael Merzenich along with Jon Kaas , as well as several others. In the s, Paul Bach-y-Rita invented a device that was tested on a small number of people, and involved a person sitting in a chair, in which were embedded nubs that were made to vibrate in ways that translated images received in a camera, allowing a form of vision via sensory substitution.
Studies in people recovering from stroke also provided support for neuroplasticity, as regions of the brain remained healthy could sometimes take over, at least in part, functions that had been destroyed; Shepherd Ivory Franz did work in this area. Eleanor Maguire documented changes in hippocampal structure associated with acquiring the knowledge of London's layout in local taxi drivers. This work on hippocampal plasticity not only interested scientists, but also engaged the public and media worldwide.
About the Book…
Michael Merzenich is a neuroscientist who has been one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity for over three decades. He has made some of "the most ambitious claims for the field — that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia — that plasticity exists from cradle to the grave, and that radical improvements in cognitive functioning — how we learn, think, perceive, and remember are possible even in the elderly.
The experiment involved sewing one eye shut and recording the cortical brain maps. Hubel and Wiesel saw that the portion of the kitten's brain associated with the shut eye was not idle, as expected.