Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is the nervous system's ability to change its own structure to adapt to one's experiences, environment, and learning. The brain does this by

reorganising, creating new connections, and strengthening existing ones. This malleability remains with you throughout your life.

Your brain is shaped not only by genes but also by your life and your material conditions. Your brain is constantly changing and building new pathways as it adapts. This neural function is called neuroplasticity; although it is greatest in childhood, it also occurs in adulthood.

Neuroplasticity in practice can be seen in London taxi drivers, who need to learn the city's 25,000 street locations by studying tens of thousands of street addresses, causing the hippocampus region of their brains to grow. We see neuroplasticity in professional pianists, who have a larger auditory cortex than that of normal people.

The brain you were born with is not the brain you will die with, because even a small change or a short period of time spent practising something changes your brain.

Modern neuroplasticity confirms that the mind and consciousness are formed by social existence and the development of productive forces, which in turn set one's state of mind. Through neuroplasticity, your ideas and mental life are reflections of your material conditions.

"The ideal is nothing else than the material world, reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." - Georgi Plekhanov, Essays on the History of Materialism.  

History

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often referred to as the father of modern neuroscience, was the first to scientifically explain neuroplasticity. He claimed that mental training creates new neuronal branches, describing this as a structural change at a microscopic level.

In the mid-20th century, researchers began developing theoretical frameworks and terminology. In 1948, Jerzy Konorski, a Polish brain researcher, described changes in neurons as a result of learning and conditioning. A year after Konorski's work, Donald Hebb introduced a theory about how learning physically changes the structure of the brain through his concept of "neurons that fire together, wire together." This means that neurons activated at the same time form connections with each other that reinforce themselves every time they are activated simultaneously.

In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita developed sensory substitution tools, the most famous of which was a chair that enabled blind people to "see" by translating tactile vibrations they felt from the chair into images they perceived in their minds. This proved that the brain is flexible: if one sense is blocked, the brain reshapes itself to obtain information through another sense.

In the 1980s, Michael Merzenich began conducting experiments in which he mapped the sensory cortex in monkeys, proving that if a monkey loses a finger, the brain begins to reshape itself to gain better control over the remaining fingers.

Today, neuroplasticity is a fundamental part of neuroscience, studied with the help of technology such as fMRI. In 2000, Eleanor Maguire scanned the brains of London taxi drivers, who had memorised thousands of complicated streets, and found that the rear part of their hippocampi was larger than normal and that the size was directly correlated with how long they had been driving.

We now know that neuroplasticity continues throughout one's life. Research on neuroplasticity forms the basis for stroke rehabilitation and treatments for learning disabilities