Rewiring the Brain to Create New Senses

How the brain's neuroplasticity lets us substitute one sense for another—and invent new ones.

Adult Neuroplasticity: More Than 40 Years of Research

The term “neuronal plasticity” was already used by the “father of neuroscience” Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) who described nonpathological changes in the structure of adult brains. The term stimulated a controversial discussion as some neuropathologists favored the “old dogma” that there is a fixed number of neurons in the adult brain that cannot be replaced when the cells die.

Are We Stuck With the Brains We're Born With?

Neuroplasticity may not be quite the super power some believe it can be.

For a More Creative Brain, Travel

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun examining more closely what many people have already learned anecdotally: that spending time abroad may have the potential to affect mental change. In general, creativity is related to neuroplasticity, or how the brain is wired. Neural pathways are influenced by environment and habit, meaning they’re also sensitive to change: New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.

How technology literally changes our brains

The point of this conversation is not that the internet is bad, nor that it is good. It’s that it is changing us, just as every medium before it has. We need to see those changes clearly in order to take control of them ourselves.

Neuroplasticity: re-wiring the brain

Your brain is amazing! It has the ability to re-wire itself, allowing you to improve skills such as walking, talking and using your affected arm. This process is known as neuroplasticity. It begins after a stroke, and it can continue for years.

Norman Doidge: the man teaching us to change our minds

Do you believe you can think yourself well, changing the very structure of your brain over time through rigorous training? Norman Doidge does…

Our Amazingly Plastic Brains

Mental and physical exercise can keep the brain fit and help it recover capacities lost to disease and trauma.

Our flexible friend

There is growing evidence that the brain can be trained to compensate for dead or damaged areas. As Ian Sample reports, this could benefit those suffering anything from a stroke to depression or relationship problems.

Rewiring Brain: Neuroplasticity

Until recently it was believed that our brains are hard-wired, just like computer or any other such equipment thus can never undergo changes and one has to remain with the type of brain he is born with. But researches show that the brain has the power to change itself. This idea of changes in brain’s function as well structure is termed as neuroplasticity. Earlier the Neuroscientists hold that neuroplasticity manifests in childhood only the research done in later half of the 20th century revealed that several aspects of brain can undergo alterations even in the adulthood.

The biological switch that could turn neuroplasticity on and off in the brain...

Neuroplasticity is the ability of neurons in the brain to change their structure. It’s what allows the brains of young animals to change more easily than brains of old animals – and it’s one of the reasons why it’s easier for children to learn languages than adults.

The Brain: Malleable, Capable, Vulnerable

In classical neuroscience, the adult brain was considered an immutable machine, as wonderfully precise as a clock in a locked case. Every part had a specific purpose, none could be replaced or repaired, and the machine was destined to tick in unchanging rhythm until its gears corroded with age. Now sophisticated experimental techniques suggest the brain is more like a Disney-esque animated sea creature. Constantly oozing in various directions, it is apparently able to respond to injury with striking functional reorganization, and can at times actually think itself into a new anatomic configuration, in a kind of word-made-flesh outcome far more characteristic of Lourdes than the National Institutes of Health.

Three neuroscientists win $1m award for discovering brain’s plasticity

In an event live-streamed from Oslo to the World Science Festival in New York City, academy president Dr. Ole Sejersted said that Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco, Carla Shatz of Stanford University, and Eve Marder of Brandeis University were being honored for discovering “mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function.”