Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Plasticity of the Brain can help Gabby Giffords

In a  great article written by David Brown of the Washington Post (Friday, January 21, 2011), he explains how victims of brain injuries have the capability to survive and thrive by the brain "healing" itself because of a characteristic known as neuroplasticity.


"The ability of the brain to compensate for damage by at least partly rewiring itself and assigning new tasks to undamaged regions is known as "neuroplasticity." It's one of the hottest topics in biology and an important one in medicine. Because of insights from functional magnetic resonance imaging and other technologies, scientists now realize that brain reorganization after injury is far more common and extensive than previously thought. They also know that neuroplasticity depends to a great degree on experience - which is to say, what the brain is forced to do in the critical weeks and months after it is injured."

Brown goes on to write:

"When an area with a specific function is destroyed, the brain first attempts to recruit nearby cells, which are often doing similar tasks, to change and perform the function of the destroyed cells.  If that's not possible, because the destroyed area is so large and the nearest surviving cells are, in fact, doing something completely unrelated, the analogous area on the other side of the brain - the opposite hemisphere - takes on some of the tasks, with varying success.
These two strategies - recruiting nearby tissue and recruiting the mirror-image area in the other hemisphere - have different success rates depending on what functions have been damaged by stroke or, in Giffords's case, by a projectile."  
 
The plasticity of the adolescent brain lends itself to great potential in growth and development.  During this time, the teen brain is strengthening it's communication pathways as the myelination process intensifies (the coating of the neuron's axons with a fatty substance known as myelin).  This process makes the brain more efficient in its messaging. Just like injured brains rewire their pathways, the adolescent brain is creating and rewiring their pathways through experiences. Thus, the experiences adolescents are participating in will impact how their brains become wired and how difficult it may be for their brains to rewire itself if it needs to change.  
 

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