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The Plastic Brain: Use it or Lose it
Brain plasticity and child development
A paper released this week in the journal Current Biology reminds us how full of potential a kid’s brain is in the early years.
The scientists showed that there is a critical period in early life when brain regions can take over for each other, compensate for deficiencies, and wire together in different ways. In other words, the young brain is ‘plastic.’ The study looked at people who had been born blind, those who had lost sight after the age of 9, and sighted people.
But first, I need to mention the most fascinating part of the study:
We have a ‘motion detector’ region in our brains, according to the paper, that allows us to see motion in our visual field. In rare cases when people have lost this functioning, they see only still frames, not moving objects.
If you pour a glass of water in front of these people, they see only a frozen stream of water. I find it amazing that our brains are that highly specialized — we need far more than just vision to make sense of the world.
The motion detector can be rewired to use sound instead of sight if someone is born blind, but not if the person looses sight after childhood. In an fMRI machine (an scanner that detects where the brain’s energy is going when a person is doing a task), when subjects heard sounds of approaching footsteps, the motion detector only fired in those born blind (because their brain was plastic enough as a young child to wire up using sound), but not in those who lost sight later in life.
We saw earlier this week how moms’ brains change when they have a baby. This is a reminder that the baby brain is capable of amazing feats, and that the first years are so important.
Image: flickr
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