Questions tagged [neuroplasticity]
The study of the adaptability of the nervous system. It includes changes in neural pathways and synapses due to changes in behavior (e.g., learning), environment (e.g., stressors) and bodily injury (e.g., brain damage).
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How does a neuron change its function, without changing its synaptic connections?
How does a neuron change its characteristics in order to change its function, without changing its connections with the neural networks? Basically, do any organelles change their properties and are ...
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How to measure tone of the cerebral cortex?
There is a lot of information about the "tone of the cerebral cortex". Some scientific papers describe that the tone could decrease or increase. However it's not clear how do they measure ...
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How long does it take for a new muscle fiber to be connected to motor neuron?
When new muscle fibers are formed through hypertrophy, how long does it take for motor neurons to connect to the new muscle cells in order to be able to control them?
After taking a break from ...
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Do neurons that *don't* fire together unwire?
We all know the classic Hebbian theory, often phrased as "neurons that fire together wire together." I'm curious about how other connections get pruned when two neurons start to fire ...
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What type of factor is practice of motor skills?
I recently asked a question about the cause of motor laterality: What causes motor laterality/ side dominance?
I understand that there can be genetic factors, epigenetic factors, or environmental ...
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What causes motor laterality/ side dominance?
I would like to understand what leads up to motor laterality, or side dominance of motor skills.
I made this assumption that it depends on neuroplasticity and the side in which one first learns the ...
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Long-term potentiations that last for a lifetime
One reads more often than not that
long-term potentiation has been reported to last for as long as several weeks
LTP is persistent, lasting from several minutes to many months
and most sources seem ...
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How can different ion channels of the same type have different cell responses?
The NMDA receptor is an ion channel and contributes to synaptic plasticity and memory. It is said that calcium ion flux through the receptor is critical for this mechanism. However, there are other ...
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Does the growth in size of hippocampus of London taxi drivers affect their net number of brain cells?
In the paper, London Taxi Drivers and Bus Drivers: A Structural MRI
and Neuropsychological Analysis in the Journal Hippocampus, the authors state that changes in the hippocampus of taxi drivers in ...
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Scaling of Ca2+/biochemical signals with dendritic spine size?
I am looking for references that discuss the scaling of biochemical signals in dendritic spines with spine size/synaptic strength. A recent paper (Walker et al. 2017) reports attenuation of NMDA ...
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How fast the brain recover itself at sleep? What can be done to accelerate this process?
In Computer Science we have "Big O Notation" to describe how efficient is an algorithm at processing some task. Those can be linear, time constant, exponential among others.
Using that analogy, How ...
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Plasticity between excitatory and inhibitory neurons?
All that I've learned about synaptic plasticity only concern the synapses between excitatory neurons. For example, all pyramidal neurons (excitatory) in the cortex have plastic synapses between them, ...
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NMDA receptor mediated plasticity figure reference
Because most of this research is over a decade old, finding a paper with a figure that clearly shows that (neuronal) synaptic plasticity (such as long-term potentiation/LTP) is NMDA receptor mediated ...
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Synaptic connectivity in the newborn's brain
In my understanding, learning is related to the strengthening and weakening of synaptic connections. Very roughly said: Synaptic connections that are used often are strengthened, those that are used ...
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Is brain plasticity such that we can train ourself to see with our ears?
I am finishing writing some code which will parse a photo (eventually video) and use all the RGB information to synthesize an audio representation. I am wondering whether a typical person has ...
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What exactly is neuroplasticity, and can it be demonstrated with a simple experiment?
As far as I know, neuroplasticity is about restoring brain functions by moving some functions to other still functional. Neuroplasticity is more prominent in children than in adults.
What are other ...
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Using perceptual adaptation for enhancing realism of VR/other entertainment
I am quite a fan of the recent oculus rift VR glasses, but it does have several flaws over normal vision, most notably a much less wide field of view, the so-called screen door effect because of too ...
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Do blind people learn Braille equally fast as the sighted?
The visually deprived brain undergoes extensive remodeling due to cross-modal plasticity. This leads to increased areas of the cortex being available for other purposes such as tactile processing. Now ...
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What is the core mechanism behind neuroplasticity?
Specifically I am looking at reopening of the critical period of plasticity.
Modern neuroscience has started to unlock the secret of neuroplasticity.
A common experimental setup is with mice. They ...
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How does Sodium Valproate cause neural plasticity
I have been reading a fascinating paper: Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch
18 individuals were given Sodium Valproate (VPA) for a fortnight during which they trained on a ...
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How well does it actually work to surgically reroute the optical nerve?
Two publications, Roe et al, 1992[1] and Metin & Frost, 1989[2], describe results pertaining to the ability of a region of cortex to process information from a different sensory mode than the one ...
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