Comments on: Neuroplasticity is not a new discovery

By: neurotic ape

neurotic ape — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:18:06 +0000

Jett, some schools of thought hold that alcoholism is not a disease in itself but a symptom or a coping mechanism of a psychological disorder. There are a number of different psychological disorders that apply here. PTSD is one of them. The thinking is that an individual uses alcohol to give themselves relief from the uncomfortable experiences associated with the underlying disorder. So instead of rewiring the brain to change the behaviour of alcoholism it would be better to “rewire” the underlying disorder that leads to alcoholism. The University of British Columbia has developed a program called Changeways which works to a degree on this premise.

By: dean reinke

dean reinke — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:24:02 +0000

Thanks for the history on neuroplasticity. Since it is true why are so many researchers still intent on proving it over and over again? The real question should be how does it occur?
How does a neuron signal to its neighbor that it needs help? And why would a neuron drop what it currently knows to take on new functionality? This should be fairly easy to figure out, you can use nanowires to listen in on single neurons or lay a grid across the cortex to listen in.
I see two possibilities, do you believe in good or evil neurons?
1. One neuron calls for help to neighboring neurons and they altruistically go to help.
2. One neuron sends out signals that wipe functionality from neighboring neurons and instructs them to copy the sending message.

By: Jett Holland

Jett Holland — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:13:01 +0000

I would love to get feedback from you all as to how one might apply (if at all) neuroplasticity to behavioral changes necessary to help those who have addition issues. One “New Age” group says that established 12 step programs around the disease of alcoholism are hogwash and if these really non diseased souls would end their quest for “treatment” and embrace; through the application of this non specific science (neuroplasticity) in the cognitive behavioral world, folks that dont really have a disease called alcoholism can be educated into sobriety. I am I lay person so I am here to learn and for feedback. Thank you

By: Pedro

Pedro — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:06:54 +0000

yep its not new. I read a paper from the 60s that proved it quite extensively. so… not new. but i guess word takes time to get around.

By: Neuroconscience

Neuroconscience — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:21:37 +0000

posting again because I totally failed to promote my blog in my last comment.

By: Neuroconscience

Neuroconscience — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:11:26 +0000

My first comment here! Vaughan, you’ve done a great job with this post. In the first month of my PhD, my supervisor actually handed me a then in-review history of neuroscience paper arguing basically the same thing, with one important tweak. As you highlight, it is true that neuroplasticity has been a topic of a great deal of research for quite a while. Ramon Y Cajal actually stated early in his career that the primary mechanism for learning was likely the plasticity of a single neuron. He later recanted this position, ending his life in line with the anti-plasticity dogma that has pervaded neuroscience for more than a century. For a variety of reasons, the research you highlighted and much more has nearly always failed to find it’s way to acceptance. Although there have been many demonstrations of mammalian adult neuroplasticity, the neuroscientific establishment simply refused to accept these findings into the mainstream.
I believe this has a lot to do with the highly modernist effort of neuroscience to separate itself from the pseudoscientific endeavors of early psychology, but that’s just conjecture. The important point is that neuroplasticity has been known about for a long time, but it wasn’t until the advent of brain imaging that it finally propelled it’s way into the mainstream of neuroscience. I find it really ironic that many big-name neuroscientists now scoff at the regular stream of MRI/fMRI neuroplasticity papers, usually with the typical remark that ‘well that isn’t interesting, EVERYTHING changes the brain’! So quickly dogma goes from total refusal to trivialization. Anyway, great post!
One last thought- it’s important to distinguish between levels of analysis and computation. I think that more recent findings regarding the functional plasticity of, for example, visual and auditory cortex, are probably somewhat revolutionary insofar as they appear to challenge a strict localizationist, modular paradigm. It remains an open question whether the kinds of top-down connectivity plasticity we see in fMRI are central computational performance, or function more as epiphenomena.
TLDR; neuroplasticity isn’t new, but a lack of anti-neuroplasticity dogma is.

By: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=568820270

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=568820270 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:47:37 +0000

Hey Vaughan,
I’d always thought that Elizabeth Gould had discovered human adult neurogenesis in 1997:
http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/gould/publications.php
(but it turns out that her 97 paper refers to neurogenesis in the brains of tree shrews!)
I think that neurogenesis might be quite important in terms of our ability to learn and adapt though. Consider the fact that there is hippocampal atrophy in the hippocampus in depression for example (which I suspect may be a biological correlate with difficulty in accepting harsh emotional events and moving on from them by forming new memories). Hippocampal neurogenesis is increased by exercise and antidepressant medication, which suggests this is a possible mechanism of causal efficacy of these methods in treating depression.
I think the real reason for the “plasticity” hype in the media was a previous misconception that any brain area related to an behaviour implied that this behaviour was “hard wired” (another term I hate to hear over-used). The “plasticity” hype is a recognition that the brain rearranges itself according to things we have learned, and that many mental abilities we might have previously considered to be “hard wired” are in fact amenable to change.