Medical Minute: What is “neuroplasticity”?
Neuroplasticity is a fancy way of saying that the brain can heal and change itself based on what you do.
The brain you have right now is not the brain you will have next week, if you decide to make small and sustained changes to your daily life.
The concept has been around since the early 1900’s, and has become an established phenomena in mainstream medicine including the fields of neurology and psychiatry since the 2000’s.
This article explains the amazing concept of neuroplasticity.
What is a neuron?
“Neuron” is the name that we’ve given the cells in your brain. Just like how you have myocytes (muscle cells), islet cells (in your pancreas), and leukocytes (infection fighting cells), neurons are the cells that make up the brain.
The picture below shows you what they look like.
Signals are sent between neurons at the synapse. This is where neurochemicals, like acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, etc, are released from the axons of one neuron and float across to land, attach, and send the signal to the other neuron.
It’s kind of like particles from a sneeze floating through the air from one person to another!
How does neuroplasticity work?
When you want to move your arm, the neurons in your frontal lobe (where the motor cortex resides) send out signals to make it happen.
When you do something over and over again, you strengthen the neurons that are responsible for that particular signal.
This strengthening, or neuroplasticity, occurs in 3 main ways:
1) More connections are made between neurons
Termed synaptogenesis, repeated exposure to something (i.e. exercise), increases the number of connections between neurons.
Increased synaptic density enhances communication between neurons (i.e. boosts the signal and widens the path, as discussed here), contributing to learning and memory.
Neurons make more synapses between each other when you repeat the same activity over and over again.
2) Brand new neurons are made
New neurons (termed neurogenesis) can be made, particularly in the hippocampus, which is where memory resides.
3) Irrelevant connections are broken down
Termed synaptic pruning, connections in the brain that aren’t helpful or are weaker than others are eliminated.
Taken together, these changes build a strong, highly connected and efficient neural network designed for your optimal performance.
Your brain adapts to what you need it to do. Like a muscle growing and changing to lift more weight.
Timing matters
As we talked about in this article, memory problems appear when your cognitive reserve is out of balance with the damage that has been done over a lifetime.
It seems that for many people, if you can strengthen the mind and stop the sources of damage, you can restore much of your mind through neuroplasticity, as long as it is done early enough.
This is the case for individuals who recover from a stroke. They are doing so through neuroplasticity.
However, after a certain degree of damage it can become too late for neuroplasticity to be able to overcome the damage.
This is why it is so important to start early to protect and strengthen your mind.
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