Psychology
Neural Fluidity
Neural fluidity refers to the brain's ability to adapt and reorganize itself in response to new experiences, learning, and environmental changes. This concept highlights the brain's plasticity and its capacity to form new neural connections, rewire existing ones, and modify its structure and function throughout life. Neural fluidity plays a crucial role in cognitive development, learning, and recovery from brain injuries.
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6 Key excerpts on "Neural Fluidity"
eBook - PDFThe Brain's Body
Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics
- Victoria Pitts-Taylor(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Duke University Press Books(Publisher)
At the start of modern neuro-science, the concept of plasticity emerged to address how neurons’ connec-tions with each other are related to the brain’s activity. In the mid-twentieth century, this synaptic or “functional” plasticity often was elaborated in con-trast to the apparently fixed structural organization of the brain. Evidence of the mature brain’s ability to rewire and reshape itself in response to new stimuli and activity has more recently led to biosocial models of brain structure as well as function. This history should not be conceived in a tel-eological fashion, where the brain is merely awarded greater plasticity over time. Even in the current moment, when neural plasticity is more broadly recognized than ever before, the brain does not appear to be globally or monolithically plastic. Rather, in different research programs plasticity is unevenly distributed across developmental time scales, various regions of the brain, and even potentially between persons. 24 CHAPTER ONE Habit, Learning, and Synaptic Plasticity The term plasticity was used in eighteenth-century materials science to describe the malleability of matter, and in the nineteenth century to denote the ability of organisms to change in response to environmental demands (Berlucchi and Buchtel 2009). Early scientific conceptions of neural plas-ticity seem to have some relation to both meanings of the term. William James (1890), for example, noted that all matter, including nervous tissue, changes structure in the face of a “modifying cause.” He defined plasticity as the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield at once. Matter changes, and it resists change; James argued that the dual ability of neurobiological matter to both modify and stabilize, in relation to the behaviors of persons, explains why people develop habits or characteristic propensities.
eBook - PDFLifespan Development and the Brain
The Perspective of Biocultural Co-Constructivism
- Paul B. Baltes, Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz, Frank Rösler(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
How this 94 Gerd Kempermann is accomplished remains one of the great scientific mysteries. The genome carries a potential that has to be realized as dependent on extragenetic factors, subsumed under nurture or environment. Evidently, this also applies to neural stem cells and adult neurogenesis. In fact, for researchers it provides one of the most direct opportunities to study the unfolding of a developmental potential and the contributions of genes and environment to the many different steps that together are “development.” brain plasticity Plasticity is how the brain adapts its structure when we use it, not the wear and tear, but those changes for the better that cause some local or general functional improvements. The relationship between structure and function is thus bidirectional. Although the term “plasticity” has many implications and although plasticity can also fail in that it, for example, might produce aberrant connections in the epileptic brain, the most prominent use of plas-ticity is in the context of learning. Learning is more than just the plain acquisition of new information and skills; it is a fundamental aspect of life. In some very profound (and not just proverbial) sense, life is continuous learning. We might intuitively find it difficult to apply the word “learning” to all living things, including invertebrates or even bacteria and plants, but quite a bit of the biology of learning and memory relevant to humans was first discovered in the sea snail aplysia and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans . Some of the most fundamental mechanisms of learning are evolu-tionarily highly conserved. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of structural brain plasticity fundamentally changed our views of the brain.
eBook - PDFTraumatic Brain and Spinal Cord Injury
Challenges and Developments
- Cristina Morganti-Kossmann, Ramesh Raghupathi, Andrew Maas(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Section 1 Traumatic Brain Injury Chapter 15 Plasticity and recovery of the injured brain Dorothy A. Kozlowski and Theresa A. Jones Introduction Neuroplasticity is the ability of the nervous system to change itself, as it does in response to experiences and to injury. Neuroplasticity is not a novel idea. In 1890, the psychologist, William James, proposed it to be the mechanism underlying the formation of motor, intellectual and professional skills, and other “habits” [1]. Neuroanatomical plasticity was also described in exquisite detail by Ram´ on y Cajal in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries in his studies of the diseased brain [2]. The idea that learning occurs as a result of activity-dependent modifications in neural circuitry gained prominence in 1949, with Donald Hebb’s profoundly influential postulate that (as com- monly simplified) neurons that fire together, wire together [3]. Nevertheless, neural plasticity continued to be viewed as largely a developmental phenomenon. In the 1960s, Hubel and Wiesel strengthened this belief and instituted the idea that there was a “critical period” for neuroplasticity. They found that depriving one eye of visual stimulation during a specific develop- mental time window in young kittens, but not in adult cats, produced blindness and significantly affected the development of the visual cortex by eliminating ocular dominance columns [4]. This idea of neuroplasticity as a developmental phenomenon persisted into the 1970s. It was around this time that Greenough and others found that mature cortical neurons in rats can grow new dendrites and synapses in response to behav- ioral manipulations, such as housing in an enriched environment or maze training. This was found first in rats that were juvenile, but past early critical periods of development [5], and soon after it was found in fully adult rats [6, 7].
eBook - PDFImproving Hand Function in Children with Cerebral Palsy
Theory, Evidence and Intervention
- Ann-Christian Eliasson, Patricia Burtner(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Mac Keith Press(Publisher)
1 BRAIN PLASTICITY IN DEVELOPMENT AND DISEASE Hans Forssberg Introduction The term brain plasticity was introduced around 100 years ago. It is used to describe how the structure and function of neural circuits are modified (1) during development, (2) by experience and learning, and (3) in response to brain lesions. In the middle of the last century, Donald Hebb postulated that cortical neural connections, i.e. synapses, are strengthened and remodelled by experience (Hebb et al 1994). He also showed that rats reared in the rich environment of his own house were much better learners and had better memory capacity than rats living in laboratory cages. The molecular mechanisms behind neural plasticity are complex and not yet fully understood, but numerous studies have shown various mechanisms underlying the activity-dependent modification of synaptic connectivity, including increased number of synapses by changed turnover of dendritic spines, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LDP) (Calverley and Jones 1990, Jenkins et al 1990, Buonomano and Merzenich 1998, Feldman et al 1999, Luscher et al 2000, Trachtenberg et al 2002, Malenka 2003). The latter two mechanisms are important for storage of information in the central nervous system (CNS) and involve several neurotransmitter systems, including gluta-mate (NMDA and AMPA receptors) and GABA (Myers et al 2000), as well as the monoamine systems (dopamine, noradrenalin and serotonin), which are involved by modulating the transmission in the other neurotransmitter systems (Bao et al 2001, Gu 2002). Neuroimaging methods used to study brain plasticity The first studies on neural plasticity were performed in experiments on animals. More recently, the development of new powerful imaging techniques has made it possible to study neural plasticity in the human brain as well. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most widely used method and enables studies on both structure and function.
eBook - PDFApproaching Humankind
Towards an Intercultural Humanism
- Jörn Rüsen, Sorin Antohi, Chun-chieh Huang, Jörn Rüsen(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- V&R Unipress(Publisher)
These differences are most pronounced in the very slowly de- veloping higher cortical association areas. Examples of such use dependent adaptive modifications and reorganizations of neuronal connectivity have been observed throughout lifetime, even in the brains of elderly subjects. The degree of brain plasticity is of course highest at younger ages, but the networks and connections between nerve cells can apparently be restructured and adjusted to new demands throughout lifetime. A prerequisite for such experience-de- pendent changes is the activation of the emotional centers (limbic system). This leads to the release of trophic, hormone-like substances, which stimulate the growth and the reorganization of nerve cell contacts and connections. Such emotional activation, i. e. situations which “go deeply under the skin”, are most often experimented during childhood and adolescence, but much less frequently during adulthood, when a person has learned to master almost all challenges of daily life routinely. The most important triggers for the adaptive modification and reorganiza- tion of neuronal networks and synaptic circuitry at any age are the problems encountered and the experiences made by an individual in the course of the so called stress-response. Therefore, the first part of this contribution will focus on the adaptive self-organization of neuronal connectivity through the mastery of challenges and of stressful experiences. In the second part, the influences of early affective relationships and of a culture of peace and non-violence on the de- veloping brain will be somewhat more closely examined. 2. Stress and the Experience-dependent Organization of Neuronal Connectivity Current stress research is characterized by fascinating insights into the mech- anisms involved in the activation and the regulation of the neuroendocrine stress response and the consequences of this activation on the body and the brain.
- M.A. Hofman, G.J. Boer, Eus JW Van Someren, J. Verhaagen, D.F. Swaab, A.J.G.D. Holtmaat(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
Following a description of the multiple types of brain plasticity, experimental methods for dissociating the specific components of experience will be discussed. Neuronal and synaptic plasticity Among the most exciting recent developments in the field of neural plasticity are the data suggesting that the brain responds to experience by adding new neurons (neurogenesis). Using a thymidine analog (BrdU) that incorporates into replicating DNA, it has been demonstrated that neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampal formation following housing in a complex environment (Kempermann et al., 1998a,b; Nilsson et al., 1999). More specifically, using a learning paradigm in which the underlying neural pathways necessary to perform the task have been very well-characterized, it was reported that the rate of neurogenesis is dramatically increased in the hip-pocampus when this structure is critically involved in learning the task, yet when the contingency does not 93 demand involvement of this structure, neurogenesis is unaffected (Gould et al., 1999). Although these increases in neuron number are small relative to the number of neurons already present in the brain, the-ories of brain plasticity that have largely focused on changes in the number and strength of synapses in neural networks must now consider the profound effects that integration of new neurons could have on both the composition and function of these networks. While neurogenesis represents an exciting area, it is a principal focus of other chapters in this volume. Thus, we highlight here specific aspects of plasticity of existing neurons as they relate to elements of non-neuronal plasticity and to the functional implications of the existence of multiple forms of brain plasticity. Plasticity of synapse number At an anatomical level, the malleability of neuronal systems and individual neurons can be quantified using a number of parameters.
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