Synaptic Package Manager

The nervous system has plasticity.

The nervous system has plasticity.

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

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

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

Researchers also learned that a surprising degree of neural plasticity results from exposure to microgravity.

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

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

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

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

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 change 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 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.

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.

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.

Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich looks at one of the secrets of the brain's incredible power its ability to actively re wire itself. He's researching ways to harness the brain's plasticity to enhance our skills and recover lost function.

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.

So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, and it was, I suppose, the subject of we have to deal in such a short time with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed.

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.

So, to summarize 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.

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.

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.