Plasticity and Functional Recovery

• Brain plasticity refers to the brains ability to adapt from experienced outside of the body
• Functional recovering is the recovering of functions in the brain from a damage area after a trauma to other undamaged areas
• Neuronal unmasking —> dormant synapses open connections to compensate for a nearby damaged area of the brain
• Role of Hippocampus in the brain is to facilitate spatial memory
• Why did Maguire et al use taxi drivers for their study


  Before qualifying as a taxi driver they had to memorise every road in London
• What was the aim of Maguire’s study


  Examine whether structural change could be detected in the brains of people with extensive experience of spatial navigation
• What was the method of Maguire et al’s study?S


  Structural MRI scans for 16 right handed taxi drivers (had been driving more than 1.5 years) and comparing them to a control group of 50 right handed normal people
• What were the results of Maguire et al’s study?


  Correlation between time driving a taxi + volume of rear right hippocampus
• Maguire et al’s study supports brain plasticity as it shows that extensive experience can change the structure of the brain
• Kemperman et al (1997) studied 12 rats who were placed in cages and 12 rats who were kept in a “complex condition”
• The complex condition included extra treats, a running wheel and items create habitats
• Kemperman et al found that’d other the 12 rats in the experimental condition had a significant amount of extra neurons compared to the intros group - particularly in the hippocampus
• However Kemperman et al’s study used animals and thee is issues with extrapolation
• A lesion is an area of the brain which has suffered damage due to injury or disease which leads to the loss of of function
• Axonal sprouting - undamaged axons sprout or grow new nerve endings to replace old ones in order to reconnect with other neurons
• Recruitment of homologous areas - similar areas are used when an area is damaged - often the other hemisphere
• Jody Miller

  • extreme seizures
  • had right hemisphere remove at age 2
  • fully functioning adult with some limited movement in left side of body but otherwise fine
• E.B

  • 2.5 years old when most of left hemisphere rremove
  • initially had language problems but after 2 years was mostly normal
  • FMRI showed brain patterns for language in right hemisphere
• Factors affecting recovery

  • age, case studies have young participants who‘s brains were more plastic
  • more educationally advanced patients have greater recovery
  • females and males recover differently based on on cognitive functions affected