Enhancing Brain Plasticity.

So, what is brain plasticity?

The nervous system has plasticity.

Knowledge, therefore, emerges from developmental experience.

But brain plasticity is more than memory.

So all of that is brain plasticity.

Let me write that down, too plasticity.

Paul Bloom PhD, Cognitive and Developmental Psychology

And brain plasticity would include, for instance, memory.

From all those developmental interactions that I've showed you before.

One is called RELN it's involved in early developmental cues.

So what's my advice if you want to to improve plasticity?

This lifelong capacity for plasticity, for brain change, is powerfully expressed.

What we know, because of neuro plasticity, that this is possible.

Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders.

It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.

In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture.

I'm compiling a developmental profile. She needs more stimulation than that room.

And the scientific mission would be to test the limits of visual plasticity.

One, these have the potential to turn into anything, that they have this plasticity.

And evolution, therefore, prepared us for this journey with a developmental openness to experience.

Well, what it buys the developing organism is a plasticity and an openness to experience.

And that therefore means that knowlegde is really something that emerges from those developmental interactions.

That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it.

If you remember this lecture tomorrow and I hope you will it's because of brain plasticity.

Now in this early period of plasticity the brain actually changes outside of a learning context.

They just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male.

We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge.

Well, brain plasticity is the process by which your brain changes depending on what has happened to it.

Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason hope for our ability to rebuild that function.

And what's so interesting about this is that sometimes, this developmental process can lead to truly remarkable results.

Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime.

This is different from a lot of the developmental work that had been done up to that point.

It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder.

So let's focus at the beginning on one part of neuroplasticity, the plasticity that we think of as memory.

When we say that something has plasticity, we're talking about its potential to turn into a lot of different things.

And these chemicals are easily absorbed through amphibians' permeable skin, causing immunosuppression, or a weakened immune system, and developmental deformities.

When you're three, you better be able to write your name legibly, or else we'll consider it a developmental delay.

Now, most of what you need to learn about brain plasticity in this talk can be summarized in the following slogan

So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently?

And what I'm going to do in the next few minutes hopefully is to tell you a little bit about what brain plasticity is, how it works, what we're doing to try to enhance it, and what you can do to enhance the plasticity of your brain.

Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things.

What we are breaking now, is into developmental evolutionary biology, and we are attempting in our lab to retro engineer a

Of course the brain, the human brain, which is where our knowledge is situated, is the repository of all of those developmental interactions.