Neuroplasticity: How to train the brain and make it obedient
Many times a day we talk and think about ourselves., but rarely ask questions about what lies behind the obvious and seemingly understandable "I". What determines how we think, what we feel, how we perceive ourselves and what we are capable of? Our capabilities are predetermined by nature - or are we doing ourselves? At the epicenter of this conflict is the brain that controls our entire life.
This is one of the most complex systems in the Universe: it is able to learn, grow and think about itself. The discovery that the environment can influence the development and growth of the brain has become a real revolution in neuroscience. Experiments of the American professor Marion Diamond in 1964 showed that in rats grown in spacious cages with lots of toys, the bark of the big hemispheres was 6% thicker than those grown in small dull cages. This means that we can change the brain by indirect effects - without operations and drugs.
For about four hundred years, a person looked at the world as an exact mechanism, like a huge clock - and in the same way he perceived himself. It seemed that we were born with “preset settings” - and we can live in strictly allocated frames. For a long time it was believed that the adult brain was formed once and for all, and its cells die irretrievably. Scientists were convinced that as soon as childhood ends, the brain ages and degrades, and our thinking inevitably worsens, that brain damage is always fatal. It was believed that it was pointless to train and train people with congenital anomalies of the brain or injured during life. And although the idea of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change under the influence of experience, was found in experiments from the end of the 18th century, it was rejected until the last decades. But now everything has changed.
How do we raise the brain
First of all, the discovery of neuroplasticity affected the upbringing of children. The baby is born with an immature brain and makes a huge leap in development in the first five years: the baby has only two or three thousand neural connections per neuron, and by the age of three, each neuron gains approximately 15,000 connections. This happens because the infant's brain reacts to all the signals of the senses, instantly creating a material embodiment for the new information in the form of cells and their connections.
The period of active growth is called "critical", since it is at this time that a person learns very easily. At this time, the environment has a tremendous effect on the brain: for example, in two or three years a child develops different components of a language (or even several, if he lives in a multilingual environment). If during the "critical" period he will not hear conversations, then he may have not only problems with speech, but also developmental delays - there is a theory that if the baby in the first years of life will be in an environment of indiscriminate noise, then some parts of it brain will not be able to form completely.
At the same time, there is evidence that even in adulthood, you can try to compensate for such violations. American neuroscience Michael Merzenich, one of the main apologists of neuroplasticity today, has developed a language training technique that is used to correct various speech disorders: dyslexia, dysgraphy, and some others (although its effectiveness is still controversial).
For a long time, it was believed that after a child’s “critical period” we could no longer affect the work of the brain - but this is not so. Back in the sixties, American neurophysiologist Paul Buck-i-Rita designed sensory replacement devices that could, for example, teach people with visual disabilities to "see." For this, he used a camera, the image with which was converted into electric signals - they were fed to a plate placed on the tongue.
It took patients from several hours to several months of training to begin to “see” with the help of this device. Their brains learned to transform signals from the surface of the tongue into visual signals. Such a reorganization of the cerebral cortex shows that the brain changes easily under the influence of external changes. This includes the more well-known phenomenon - the aggravation of touch in people who have lost their sight: in this case, the neural networks that are no longer used by sight, are involved in the activity of the tactile nerves, increasing the sensitivity of the skin integument.
How the body draws a brain map
Another tool for influencing the brain is our own body. For the first time, it was clearly shown by the same Buck-and-Rita, who helped his father to recover, paralyzed and numb after a stroke. His father, Pedro, every day was learning elementary things like a child: to distinguish and repeat sounds, reach for objects, grab them, crawl, play cubes, pronounce words - and so on until I started to walk and talk again (as a result, he I could again lecture at the university). At that time it was not possible to investigate the damage in the brain of a living person after a stroke - only when Pedro died, the autopsy showed that the stroke was extremely extensive and a significant area of his brain was damaged, while the remaining brain cells were able to take over the functions of the lost parts.
With the advent of the brain research techniques of living people, we are more aware of how people live and function, having no part of or just one of the brain hemispheres from birth. Previously, science did not believe that such people are able to learn, be creative, and love loved ones - but this turned out to be untrue. In the book by Norman Doyd, Plasticity of the Brain, there are many examples of the neuroplasticity of the brain of such people that knows no limit.
Body-induced neuroplasticity occurs more often in life than we think. Brilliant dancers and pianists, people setting sports records, and women receiving multiorgasm - they all influence the brain through body training. Each part of the body is represented in the somatosensory cortex: the more sensitive and active parts of the body are larger, and the less sensitive and active parts of the body are fewer neural connections. Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, for clarity, created a "homunculus", which illustrates how the body is "projected" in the brain. If you train some skill - for example, to drive your fingers along the strings of a violin with cosmic speed - then the brain's “brain maps” become larger, more detailed, more differentiated. At the same time, the opposite is also true: what you do not use weakens, so if you stop doing something, then you lose the skill.
The same property of the brain can be explained by getting rid of paralysis caused by injuries, despite the deplorable predictions of doctors. Michael Merzenich showed in his experiments how nervous activity changes the work of the brain. If the nerve connecting your arm to the brain is damaged, then after a while the brain learns to use the neighboring nerve to control with the same hand - it’s enough to “force” the brain. Mercenich proved experimentally that this organ loses its skills as easily as it learns new things: if it gets used to the fact that we don’t use a limb, it removes it from the brain map, distributing neurons that were previously used for other, more urgent tasks. But if a person is placed in a situation where he can use only an immobilized hand, in a few weeks the brain will begin to "feel" it again. These methods are used, for example, to recover from a stroke. Of course, the recovery time depends on the severity of the damage - but these experiments force us to look at the idea of rehabilitating patients differently.
Why study is never too late
But what if we just want to learn how to influence the brain, improving the quality of life - that is, affecting our emotional state, intellectual potential and creative abilities? Many scientists are fighting over the schemes of such trainings, but not a single methodology with a powerful evidence base exists yet - so don’t believe the manufacturers of applications and games that say they are tested by neuroscience. Neuroscience is still not sure about anything, but she still has some guesses.
For example, the world-famous series of studies of London taxi drivers, conducted by Irish neurophysiologist Eleanor Maguire, proved that the learning process causes the brain to evolve. London is a topographically very complex city, and taxi drivers have to try for several years to get a license. Maguire proved that those who completed training at a London taxi driver have an enlarged hippocampus (he is responsible for memory, and his learnability depends on him). The more advanced your hippocampus is, the better your memory and ability to compare new knowledge with the old base. Simply put, research has proven: the more you study, the better you study, the longer you study, the easier it gets. The saying "learning is never too late" is also about neuroplasticity.
Why running is as important as reading
True, intensive training may also have disadvantages for the brain. A sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity can lead to circulatory disorders - since one-fifth of the oxygen in the blood gets to the brain, it suffers greatly from the lifestyle of a typical city dweller. New research on the effects of exercise on the brain makes us finally part with the stereotypes that this occupation is not for intellectual or creative people. Remember the enriched environment rats in the experiments of Marion Diamond: in "interesting" cages they, of course, did not read books, but ran a great deal - further studies showed that even running in a wheel helps the rat brain to grow.
It turned out that aerobic loads in humans contribute to the growth of neurons in the hippocampus - and therefore, improve cognitive abilities, the ability to associate and connect facts. Student Marion Diamond Wendy Suzuki, whose simple book about neuroplasticity and everything in the world has been translated into Russian, is actively developing this topic.
How to make the brain obedient
Recently it has become clear that our thoughts and attitudes can also affect the plasticity of the brain. So far, there is no solid body of research on the effects of meditation on the brain, but those that have already been conducted show long-term changes in electrical activity in the brain. One of the most studied meditation techniques in practice — concentration on an object and concentration without an object — is used by Western experts to increase creativity and thinking efficiency, the book "The Net and the Butterfly" has just been published.
Neuroplasticity cannot be called a uniquely strong brain quality. After all, this is our weakness, especially if we are not aware of its effect. The effectiveness of multiple repetitions of advertising and the work of propaganda prove: with the help of training, the human brain can be “tuned” to the initially alien needs and emotions, making certain goods vital for us, and the people of the neighboring state - deadly. The same relationship models in romantic films, the same sexual stimuli in pornography, political slogans on YouTube channels and emotional statements of flash mobs in social networks that we consume day after day, change the structure of our brain. And along with it - our psychophysiology, emotionality and beliefs. Knowing how sensitive our brain is to experience, a person of the future may have to become much more attentive and selective to control his work himself.
Photo:helloSG - stock.adobe.com (1, 2, 3)
