NeuroPlasticity

Today I am going to talk about neuroplasticity! I am excited about this topic. It’s one of the main reasons I developed this website and started my podcast. Plasticity is your ability to change. It is your Superpower!

A formal definition of Neuroplasticity is, the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, usually in response to learning or life experiences or during recovery after a traumatic brain injury or stroke.

What I want to talk about is why you should be excited about plasticity. I want to acknowledge it’s role in your ability to change. By giving your brain the right stimulus through music, movement, visual stimulus with art, etc. all kinds of input can produce change in your brain. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to rewire. It gives you the ability to learn new things.

So how and where is this change happening? Well, it depends. To explain it better we first have to understand that the brain has different sections or lobes that are responsible for different things. Let’s look at a couple of areas as examples of this. The back part of your brain known as the occipital lobe is mainly responsible for interpreting or processing vision. It’s responsible for visual perception like the color, form, and motion of objects. 

The frontal lobe is known for executive function and emotional control. That is the ability to control urges and actions. When you are angry it is the ability to not act out. The ability to restrain from saying or doing something you would later regret.

So what is the point of acknowledging the different areas? Well when these areas are stimulated through input like music or movement the neurons responsible for processing that input become active or “fire” as we say. I’m sure some of us have heard the saying “what fires together wires together”. What that means, is that when different parts or areas of the brain fire at the same time over and over eventually they will develop a connection or wire together.

So why is this important?

Multiple areas of the brain must work together to complete an action or thought. The ability to speak involves several areas. You must have the ability to recall words, use those words in a specific order to formulate a coherent sentence and then motor plan to move the appropriate muscles to produce sound that is pronounced clearly and at an appropriate volume.

There is a lot going on there involving multiple areas of the brain. If you were to look at an MRI of the brain of an indvidual while they were speaking you would see that many different areas of their brain are firing. This is important in speech and language development in children. The development of speech is a great example of our brain changing and growing new connections.

An interesting fact about the different areas of the brain being assigned different tasks is that those areas of the brain can strengthen and grow in size when that specific area is targeted with input. I want to clarify, we’re not talking about the size of the brain increasing, we’re talking about a particular area taking over more real estate. For example, I own ten acres of land. I’m growing crops on one acre but I decide to use four acres to grow crops. I still only have ten acres I’m just dedicating a bigger area of that land to grow crops.  

A great example of this is the study done on London taxi cab drivers. The streets of London were developed slowly over centuries so there was no urban design grid like you would usually find when planning the development of major cities like New York or DC. Finding your way around London before GPS would probably require a map in hand but in the case of a Taxi driver, a map in their head. Taxi drivers would train between two to four years to memorize the location of every street in the city. They basically had a spatial map of London in their head.  The test given to drivers required the ability to not only know the most efficient route from A to B, but to recall landmarks one would see along the way.

A group from the University College of London were curious about the effect this kind of memorization would have on the brain. They looked particularly at an area called the hippocampus which is the part of the brain responsible for spatial intelligence. What they found is that London cab drivers have a significantly larger hippocampus than the average person. In fact, they found them to have larger hippocampi than almost anyone else they had looked at. They also found that as drivers retired and stopped relying on this spatial memory on a daily basis their hippocampus began to shrink back to a “normal” size.  This is a great example of how constant input can have an effect on the brain.

Speaking of input changing the brain, lets take a quick look at a few therapies and the basic idea of neuroplasticity behind them. Let’s look at physical therapy for example, after someone has had a stroke and loses the ability to move a limb. Quick fact, the left side of our brain controls movement on the right side of our body and the right side of our brain controls movement on the left side of our body.

Now if you look a little closer at the frontal lobe it can be broken down into smaller sections that are involved in motor planning. If a traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes damage to the left premotor cortex area of the frontal lobe, which is the area that initiates movement for the right side, there may be a loss of ability to move the right side of the body. Some of the neuro connections that once allowed the brain to communicate with a particular area of the body may be damaged or broken. Depending on the severity of damage to that area of the brain, with the right stimulus or input connections may be reestablished.  This is the goal of repetitive and consistent therapy after TBI or stroke.

When considering therapy it is important to note that there can be success in both habilitative and rehabilitative therapy. Rehabilitative therapy is when someone had a skill and lost it.  The goal is to regain or restore the skill. Habilitative therapy is seen in helping an individual develop a skill which is often the case with speech therapy for children who are struggling to develop speech. In this case for whatever reason the appropriate connections or preprogrammed milestones for speech development were not made. With the right therapy or stimulation those connections can be developed and strengthened.

So I hope you enjoyed this little introduction to neuroplasticity and you are interested in learning more. There are so many stories out there about recovery after stroke or brain injury. If you found any of this interesting and are motivated to look at more examples of plasticity, I highly recommed reading Dr. Norman Doidge’s books, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing. These books are full of stories about individuals using their superpower, Neuroplasticity.