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Plasticity and Functional Recovery - Coggle Diagram
Plasticity and Functional Recovery
Plasticity
The brain has the ability to change throughout life.
When we are babies, there is a rapid growth of synaptic connections which peaks at about 15,000 at age 2-3.
As we age, the ones we use are strengthened and others are deleted.
Functional Recovery
Following physical injury or other forms of of trauma e.g. stroke, other areas of the brain have been able to take over the function of the affected areas.
Neuroscientists suggests this can happen quickly after trauma and then slow down where a person may have to go through further rehabilitation to aid recovery.
1. Axonal Sprouting
- the growth of new nerve endings which connect with other undamaged nerve cells to form new pathways.
2. Reformation of blood vessels
- in order to increase oxygen flow around the brain.
3. Recruitment of homologous areas
- on the opposite side of the brain to perform specific tasks.
Maguire et al (2000)
Found that the anterior hippocampus was bigger in the control group and the posterior hippocampus was bigger in the taxi drivers.
Found a positive correlation between hippocampus size and length of license.
Used 16 male taxi drivers and 60 male non-taxi drivers.
STRENGTHS: unable to show demand characteristics, doesn't pose any health risks, uses quantitative data so easy to analyse.
WEAKNESSES: androcentric, quantitative data is less detailed, lacks ecological validity as based on MRI scans which do not happen in everyday life.
Evaluation
Led to the development of
neurorehabilitation
which uses motor therapy and electrical stimulation of the brain to counter negative effects and deficits in motor and cognitive functions.
Sometimes the brain's ability to rewire itself can have negative effects for example, 60-80% of amputees have experienced phantom limb syndrome meaning the brain has reorganised in a maladaptive way.
Functional plasticity can still continue as people get older:
Bezzola et al (2012)
saw that 40 hours of golf training produced changes i the neural representation of movement in p's ages 40-60.
Hubel and Weisel (1963)
analysed kittens, brain cortical responses after sewing 1 eye shut and found that the visual cortex from the closed eye still processed information from the open eye.