Brain plasticity (or neuroplasticity): what is it?

What we experience changes us physically. Our brain mutates through experience.

Although all brains look almost the same, in reality they are far from being the same. It is true that superficially they all share a basic structure and a certain shape, but if we examine them in detail we will see that they are all incredibly different; each of them contains neural circuits of very different shapes and distributions.

Moreover, these differences are not explained by genes, i.e., we are not born with them and maintain them in a relatively stable form. In reality, these features that make our brains unrepeatable have to do with a fact that is true in all cases: each life is unique, and the experiences we live make our brains change physically. This phenomenon is known as brain plasticity or neuroplasticity..

What is brain plasticity?

Neuroplasticity, also known as brain or neuronal plasticity, is the concept that refers to the way our nervous system changes from its interaction with the environment. refers to the way in which our nervous system changes as a result of its interaction with the environment.. Even in the case of monozygotic twins this interaction is not identical, which means that each person perceives the world and acts on it in a different way, depending on the sequence of contexts in which he or she lives.

Moreover, neuronal plasticity is not something that takes a long time to occur: it happens constantly, in real time, and even while we sleep. We are constantly receiving a torrent of stimuli and we are emitting a constant flow of actions that modify the environment, and all these processes cause our brain to modify itself.

To understand this in a simple way, we can think of what the term "plasticity" refers to. The brain, like plastic, can adapt to virtually any mold.. However, two things must be qualified in this comparison. The first is that neuroplasticity depends on the intervention of an external intelligence that directs the fora modeling process towards a specific purpose (in the case of the example, the manufacturer of plastic figures or parts), and the second is that, unlike plastic, the structure and shape of the components of our brain can change a lot on a constant basis: not only in a "manufacturing phase".

How does brain plasticity occur?

Neuroplasticity is based on the way in which neurons in our nervous system connect with each other. As the Spanish physician Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered, the brain is not composed of a tangle of compacted cells that form a single structure, but are microscopic bodies with autonomy and physically separated from each other that send information to each other without ever joining together definitively. They are, in short, morphological individualities..

When a group of neurons are activated at the same time, they tend to send information to each other. If this pattern of activation is repeated with a certain frequency, these neurons not only send information to each other, but also tend to seek a more intense union with the others that are activated at the same time, becoming more predisposed to send information to each other. This increased probability of activating together is physically expressed in the creation of more stable neuronal branches that link these nerve cells and make them physically closer together, which modifies the microstructure of the nervous system.

For example, if the neurons that are activated when we recognize the visual patterns of a chocolate bar are "switched on" at the same time as those that are activated when we experience the taste of sweetness, both groups of nerve cells will become a little more connected to each other, which will cause our brain to change even a little bit.

The same happens with any other experience: although we do not notice it, we are constantly experiencing experiences (or, better said, small portions of experiences) that occur practically at the same time and that make some neurons strengthen their bonds more and others weaken theirs more. This occurs both with sensations and with the evocation of memories and abstract ideas; the Halo Effect can be considered as an example of the latter.

An evolutionary advantage

Is there a purpose to this ability of our nervous system to be shaped by our experiences? Not really; it is simply a product of evolution that, over hundreds of millions of years, has been carving our brain and making it have certain properties.

In fact, brain plasticity is the opposite of a design created to achieve specific goals, because instead of making our behavior stereotypical and predictable, it makes it incredibly complex, connected to the multiple details of the context in which we live and dependent on our past experiences. This means that neuroplasticity has a negative side (the appearance of phobias, traumas, etc.) and a positive side (our ability to learn from our experience and create complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, for example).

However, the fact that brain plasticity has no specific purpose does not mean that in the balance of pros and cons, the former have outweighed the latter. The creation of large and highly interconnected societies, our ability to invent artifacts and new technological advances and, of course, the ease with which we can learn a new language, the ease of learning a language are all phenomena we have enjoyed thanks to brain plasticity and which explain much of the overwhelming evolutionary success that our species has had so far.

Brain plasticity makes our capacity to adapt to changing situations very high.We can deal with many of the new problems for which evolution has not had time to generate an adaptation mechanism through natural selection. In the face of a natural catastrophe, for example, there is no need to wait for environmental pressures to cause some individuals to reproduce more than the rest, so that thousands of years later the entire population has an appropriate genetic inheritance to deal with the problem: simply, individuals in a few generations learn to create technological and social solutions that had never been conceived before.

The personal implications

Beyond this cold analysis based on the growth of the human population, which need not correspond to the personal value we might attribute to neuroplasticity, we could also say that much of our ability to be happy depends on this characteristic. of our central nervous system.

Without brain plasticity we would not be able to create the abstract ideas necessary to generate an autobiographical memory that allows us to be self-aware, nor would we be able to learn from our mistakes or, in general, have what we call "mental life". Brain plasticity is such a basic component of the normal functioning of our brain that without it we would be as close to an assembly line robot as we could imagine.

Resilience and well-being

At the same time, brain plasticity makes us very good at developing resilience, which is our ability to overcome very tough situations. For example, it is known that the perception of subjective well-being does not diminish significantly as we age away from the moment of our birth, which indicates that despite all the blows that life can give us, they do not "accumulate" or compromise our happiness in a chronic way. This maintenance in the level of well-being is produced thanks to the capacity of our neurons to reorganize themselves in the most convenient way, even when age causes many of them to disappear.

In short, neuroplasticity allows us to stay afloat despite physical and emotional adversities. Although we often tend to mythologize those aspects of the human mind that seem permanent, we must never forget that each of us are constantly changing beings. are beings in constant changeliterally; and this is true for our psyche as well.

Bibliographical references:

• Jäncke, L. (2009). Music drives brain plasticity. In: F1000 Biology Reports.
• Keller TA, Just MA (January 2016). "Structural and functional neuroplasticity in human learning of spatial routes". NeuroImage.
• Livingston R.B. (1966). "Brain mechanisms in conditioning and learning". Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin.
• Wayne N.L.; et al. (1998). "Seasonal fluctuations in the secretory response of neuroendocrine cells of Aplysia californica to inhibitors of protein kinase A and protein kinase C". Gen. Comp. Endocrinol. 109 (3).