Neuroplasticity

For most of the twentieth century, the textbook view of the adult brain was fixed: by adolescence, its circuits were laid down and could only deteriorate. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, declared in 1928 that in the adult centers, the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable; everything may die, nothing may be regenerated — and he was wrong, with his wrongness as the central correction in neuroscience over the past forty years. The adult brain is substantially plastic: synapses strengthen and weaken with experience throughout life, new neurons are born in specific brain regions even in old age, and cortical maps reorganize in response to injury and learning. Neuroplasticity is the biological substrate of all learning, recovery, and adaptation.

Neuroplasticity operates at multiple levels and timescales. Synaptic plasticity changes the strength of individual synapses through long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) on timescales from seconds to days; structural plasticity makes dendritic spines themselves grow, retract, and enlarge even in adult brains — two-photon microscopy in living mice shows spines added during motor learning. Adult neurogenesis generates new neurons throughout life in two well-established mammalian regions, the subgranular zone of the hippocampal dentate gyrus and the subventricular zone. Cortical maps reorganize under experience and injury: the somatosensory homunculus is not fixed (after amputation the cortical territory of the missing limb gets invaded — the basis of phantom-limb phenomena and Ramachandran's mirror-box therapy), string players have enlarged left-hand-finger representations, London taxi drivers who memorize ~25,000 streets to pass the Knowledge have enlarged posterior hippocampi (Maguire 2000), and in cross-modal plasticity blind individuals' V1 is recruited for Braille reading. Critical periods mean plasticity is not constant — early in development, experience powerfully shapes circuits, and after the period closes the same experience has limited effect — but critical-period plasticity can be partially reopened in adults by manipulating molecular brakes. The plasticity-stability tradeoff is the deep insight: too much plasticity destabilizes existing memories, too little prevents new learning, and the adult brain appears to have reduced plasticity precisely to protect what it has already learned.