plasticity + functional recovery

• what is brain plasticity

  the brains ability to change and adapt as a result of experience

  important for brain development and behaviour
• life experiences

  people gain new experiences = new nerve pathways developing and connections become stronger

  plasticity in 60 year olds - taught new skill of juggling - grey matter in the visual cortex increased and reversed when practice stopped
• video games study

  compared control group with experimental group

  trained for two months for 30 mins a day on super mario

  significant increases of grey matter in the visual cortex and hippocampus

  resulted in new synaptic connections for spatial navigation etc
• plasticity AO3 - animal studies 


  used rats to investigate the effect of environment on the number of neurons in the brain

  2 groups:

  1: complex environment

  2: simple lab cages

  found evidence of increased numbers of new neurons in the hippocampus of group 1

  :( generalisability
• plasticity AO3 - human studies


  london taxi drivers - used MRI scans and calculated amount of grey matter in their brains / control group

  the hippocampus = memories + navigation was larger and positively correlated with the amount of time they’d been taxi driving

  :( no baseline evidence - previously large hippocampus could’ve subconsciously led them to become taxi drivers
• what is functional recovery

  where the brain shows evidence of moving functions from a damaged area to other dormant areas
• two mechanisms for recovery

  neuronal unmasking

  stem cells
• what is neuronal unmasking

  dormant synapses are synapses that exist anatomically but their function is blocked

  increased amount of input to these synapses can then unmask them and activate them
• what are stem cells


  unspecialised cells that can give rise to different cell types that carry out different functions

  can be implanted into the brain to directly replace dead or dying cells
• functional recovery AO3 - animal studies

  randomly assigned rats with traumatic brain injury to two groups

  1: received stem cells into the region of brain damage

  2: did not receive stem cells

  after three months - 1 showed developments of neuron like cells with a stream of stem cells moving to the site of injury

  :( generalisability
• functional recovery AO3 - age

  was proposed that functional plasticity reduces with age

  but

  things can still be modified in adulthood with intense retraining