plasticity and functional recovery

• practical application - understanding of brain plasticity has contributed to the field of neurorehabilitation e.g movement therapy, electrical stimulation as spontaneous recovery tends to slow down after a few weeks. shows that even though the brain has the ability to heal itself to a certain point further intervention is also required for it to be completely successful.
• negative plasticity - prolonged drug use leads to poorer cognitive functioning as well as increased risk of dementia later in life (medina). 60-80% of amputees develop phantom limb syndrome where they feel the missing limb as if it was there. this is thought to be due to cortical reorganization in the somatosensory cortex
• age and plasticity - functional plasticity decreases with age. Ladina provided 40 hours of gold training to 40-60 year olds. Using FMRI researchers observed reduced motor cortex activity in novice golfers compared to a control group, suggesting more efficient neural representations after training. This shows neural plasticity does continue throughout the lifespan
• concept of cognitive reserve - Eric Schneider discovered that the more time brain injury patients had spent in education, the greater their chance of disability free recovery was. Suggested that educational attainment may influence how well the brain adapts after injury.