Plasticity and functional recovery

• Brain plasticity refers to the brains ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. This ability to change plays an important role in brain development and behaviour
• Researchers used to believe that changes in the brain only took place during infancy and childhood, but more recent research has demonstrated that the brain continues to create new neural pathways and alter existing ones to adapt to new experiences as a result of learning
• There are many different types of experience that can do this. Factors that are now known to affect neuronal structure and function include life experience, video games and even meditation
• Gopnik et al (1999) found that at age 2-3, an infant brain has about 15,000 synaptic connections. This is twice as many as an adults brain
• Ballantyne et al (2008) investigated whether there’s more plasticity in infancy. Infants who experienced a stroke shortly after birth developed normally, having no cognitive or language impairments related to the area of the brain their stroke occurred in. In adults who suffered strokes, the effects varied, depending on the extent of the resulting damage which indicates that younger brains are more plastic than older brains, showing more capability to change and adapt following injury to the brain
• Playing video games makes complex cognitive and motor demands. Kuhn et al (2014) compared a control group with a video game training group that was trained for two months for atleast 30 minutes a day, playing super Mario. They found a significant increase in grey matter in various brain areas including the cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum. This increase wasn’t present in the control group and they concluded that the video game training had resulted in new synaptic connections in brain areas involved in spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory and motor performance
• Functional recovery refers to the recovery of abilities and mental processes that have been compromised as a result of brain injury or disease
• When brain cells are damaged or destroyed the brain can rewire itself over time so that some level of function can be regained
• There is often some significant recovery in the immediate days or weeks following traumatic brain injury (spontaneous recovery)
• Brain damage can cause swelling of the brain tissue and this can affect behaviour. This swelling dies down over days and weeks and this is responsible for a great deal of early recovery
• Neurogenesis is when destroyed neurons are replaced by the growth of new neurons
• Axonal sprouting is the growth of new nerve endings which connect with other undamaged nerve cells to form new neural pathways
• Recruitment of homologous areas is when the brain compensates for damage caused by processing information using similar areas of the brain in the opposite hemisphere to the damage