Brain Plasticity In Adulthood

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The brain is an incredibly dynamic and resilient structure, and evidence of this is seen in plasticity of the brain that persists through adulthood. Perhaps the most informative and clear examples of plasticity in the adult brain are adaptation to injury, as well as increased proficiency/skill in specific cognitive domains especially after being exposed to periods of training/treatment in addition. Other kinds of temporary plasticity (undergo substantial change even after the critical period of development has passed and an individual has entered adulthood (Deheane, 2009). When considering plasticity in brain structure, one must consider the changes that can occur in various types of networks in typically developing adults. In order to understand…show more content…
Functional plasticity (also known as online, within task, or short term) plasticity has been shown in reading disabled (RD) individuals, specifically in our lab during a single-word reading task (Pugh et al., 2008). In this fMRI task, participants were asked to make an animacy judgment (was the presented visual stimulus a living item or not---about 1/3 of the stimuli were living objects where as 2/3 were not, within each run) in regards to a visual stimulus. Findings from this study showed that unsurprisingly, the RD adolescents and young adults were under-engaging typical language processing areas (i.e. OT/Fusiform, Thalamus, MTG, STG, IFG, etc.). However, perhaps the more promising finding arose when looking at the data a bit more carefully to view the impact of repeated words (i.e. within a functional run, specific word stimuli were repeated up to 6…show more content…
One study used voxel-based morphometry to subject medical students to 3 fMRI scans in a period of a few months (Draginski et al., 2006). Magnetic resonance images were obtained at three different time points while medical students studied for their medical examination. During the learning period, the gray matter increased significantly in the posterior and lateral parietal cortex bilaterally. These structural changes did not change significantly toward the third scan during the semester break 3 months after the exam. The posterior hippocampus showed a different pattern over time: the initial increase in gray matter during the learning period was even more pronounced toward the third time point (Draginkski et al., 2006). These results indicate that the acquisition of a highly intensive amount of abstract information may be related to a particular pattern of structural gray matter changes in particular brain areas that can lead to more long-term change (which persisted weeks after the examination) even after the learning and the study period had
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