Podcast (Dr J Moch)
Listen to "Neuroplasticity et al" from Jonathan on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/jonathan424/episodes/ep-e1drl5/a-a3auh
Key Ideas.
There is an old medical school joke that goes like this: On the first day of start of studies, the Professor states: “In thirty years time, half of the knowledge we teach you will be proven wrong. Unfortunately, we do not know which half!” Well, after thirty years since graduation the joke is not so funny anymore. It is a truism, especially within the emerging neuroscience field. Allow me to describe, simply, five such fundamental flip flops.
Firstly, the Brain can change its form and function based on repetitive experiences. Throughout Life. In many ways. In different parts of the brain. For good or for bad. This hopeful construct is called now NeuroPlasticity, that underpins the science of habit formation.
The London Black Cabbie study clearly showed increase volume in the hippocampus, the primary memory engine room. McGuire and colleagues divided cabbies, who prior to GPS, must have memorized at least 25,000 geographical facts that covered all of greater London, from bus drivers who drive the same route, and return, day in and day out.
Brain scans were performed before cabbies started learning the Knowledge, and after completion. The size of the back end (posterior) of the hippocampus enlarged twice the size in cabbies. There was no shift in size in the bus drivers’ hippocampus. Donald Hebb (1949) said it succinctly: “Neurons that fire together, bind together!”
Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist, has a special interest in how disabled brains (with precise interventions) can heal themselves. Read his book to get taste for the power of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change throughout life. Bang goes the idea I was taught in the late 1970s/1980s that the Brain is fixed and unchangeable from young adulthood.
Link.
More about Brain plasticity
Video.
A different way of thinking about the potential of the Brain.
Dr Norman Doidge. The Brains Way of Healing
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