plasticity and functional recovery of the brain
- Created by: kateida0
- Created on: 07-06-18 19:18
Brain plasticity- describes the brains tendency to change and adapt (functionally and phsyically) as a result of experience and new learning.
brain experience rapid growth of synaptic connections during infancy, peaking at 15,000 at 2-3 y/o, which is twice as many as an adult will have as rarely used connections are deleted and frequently used connections are strenthened in a process called synaptic pruning. used to think that changed were limited to childhood but new research shows neural connections can be changed or formed at any time due to learning and experience
Research into plasticity-
Maguire et al: found significantly more volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus in london taxi drivers than in matched control group which is though to be the result of 'the knowledge' test london cabbies have to take to assess their knowledge of city streets and possible routes, this learning appears to alter to the structure of their brains and longer they had been in the job the more pronounced the differences. this part of the brain is linked with development of spatial and navigational skills
Draganski et al: imaged medical students brains 3 months before and after final exams and found learning induced changes to the posterior hippocampus and parietal cortex, presumably as result of exam
Mechelli et al: found larger parietal cortex in bilinguals than in matched monolingual control
Functional recovery of the brain after trauma- a form of plasticity. following damage through trauma, the brains ability to redistribute…
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