Synaptic Package Manager

Enhancing Brain Plasticity.

So, what is brain plasticity?

The nervous system has plasticity.

But brain plasticity is more than memory.

So all of that is brain plasticity.

Let me write that down, too plasticity.

And brain plasticity would include, for instance, memory.

It represents changes of hundreds of millions, possibly billions of synaptic connections in your brain.

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.

An artificial structure conjured into being by the calcium ion exchange of a million synaptic fringes.

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.

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

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.

According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain.

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.

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.

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.

Here's another thing you can do if you want to improve your memory capabilities and your brain plasticity, and that is do physical exercise.

A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain changes a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections.

Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine.

And we're understanding there're growth factors that go on, parts of these NR2B receptors are turned up, and the entire plasticity machinery is turned on along with these new baby cells.

So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, it was, I suppose, the subject of we have to deal in such a short time with brain plasticity.

Every time a young baby learns something new to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up new synaptic connections are being built in the brain.

The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain.

And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.

Unlike the smashed glass of my car, plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility, with treatment, to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness.

So babies have this very rich multisensory experiences on a daily basis, and when you combine that with the plasticity and openness of the nervous system to experience, what you've got is the acquisition of knowledge, in fact.

Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses.

I'm going to talk about using these strategies to actually design brain plasticity based approach to drive corrections in the machinery of a child that increases the competence of the child as a language receiver and user and, thereafter, as a reader.

Prakash, in its five years of existence, it's had an impact in multiple areas, ranging from basic neuroscience plasticity and learning in the brain, to clinically relevant hypotheses like in autism, the development of autonomous machine vision systems, education of the undergraduate and graduate students, and most importantly in the alleviation of childhood blindness.

So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients.

The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain.