Review: So How Plastic is Your Brain Really?

New research show that we can birth new brain cells into advanced adulthood

I was stimulated to write this article by new research that finally proves that we can generate new neurons in adult brains.

I have been talking, teaching, and training on all things the brain for nigh on 15 years now - and one thing that fascinates audiences is the idea that our brain is continually plastic i.e. it grows and develops according to usage. This also generates attention-generating headlines in the media such as “meditation grows the brain” or “reading grows the brain” or “gaming changes the brain of teenagers”.

The thing is we seem to have this inbuilt concept of the brain being static and not growing or changing unlike our bodies: you have a good brain or a bad brain and that’s it for life.

Not so, I constantly tell people - and actually this shouldn’t be a surprise. It shouldn’t be a surprise because like the rest of our body the brain is a biological system - pretty obvious, right. And biological systems adapt to their environment - to a degree. Train our muscles and they get bigger, use different brain pathways and this makes them more efficient and also bigger.

This means that any new usage, such as learning to play the piano, or reading more, or doing brain games, or learning a new language, or playing a new sport, will stimulate activation of networks in the brain and hence also some growth (though at only a minute level). Alternatively, stress, toxic stress, and trauma can leave it’s mark by diminishing activity and reducing size of various regions.

But there has been some scepticism to this, much of this is inferred or is limited by current technology, and as usual in neuroscience, a lot of research into this is in animals. So is this the same in human beings?

Well, yes, but the question is to what degree. People who suffer severe brain damage do not recover fully so this plasticity is clearly limited, and no matter how hard I try, I won’t become a chess master. Clearly our plasticity has limits.

Those of you who are regular readers may remember I reported on a review of plasticity a while back which was a bit sobering. So what is it and how plastic is the brain and what did that research find about birthing new neurons in adulthood - even advanced adulthood (thankfully!)?

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You Can't Rewire Your Brain! Oh, Yes You Can...Kind Of!

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First, let’s understand this brain plasticity a bit better. We can broadly think of brain plasticity along three mechanisms (there are others):