Brain Plasticity

Neural growth and learning due to learning new skills or thoughts or processes The more we repeat something the more the neural connections are strengthened e.g learning,swimming

Mental activity Create new connections Repeat mental activity and then create new connections

Creating new or developing inhibitory neural pathways

Maguire et al 2000 taxi drivers

-group 1 (taxi drivers)had 16 pps and group 2 had 50 pps (non taxi drivers) -Taxi drivers are required to learn the knowledge including 25,000 street names and on average it takes them three years to learn -Maguire et al studied taxi drivers to see the changes in the brain detected as a result of the experience of spatial navigation -Using MRI scans researchers calculated the amount of grey matter in the brain of taxi drivers and then a set of control participants

-They found that the posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control Pps -Taxi drivers had a small anterior hippocampus than the control group. -There was a positive correlation between time spent as a taxi driver and size of the posterior hippocampus

This indicates brain plasticity happens and changes due to environmental factors providing it with validity

Maguire et al studied taxi drivers to see the changes in the brain detected as a result of the experience of spatial navigation.there was 16 taxi drivers pps and 50 non taxi driver pps . Using MRI scans researchers calculated the amount of grey matter in the brain of taxi drivers and the set of control participants.They found that the posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control Pps they also found out that Taxi drivers had a small anterior hippocampus than the control group. Furthermore ,There was a positive correlation between time spent as a taxi driver and size of the posterior hippocampus This indicates brain plasticity happens and changes due to environmental factors providing it with validity.

This time Maguire compared London taxi drivers to London bus drivers They all had MRI Scans and was given a series of test : -London landmarks -distance to places in London -word list recall -stress levels (cognitive function)

That same as the previous study : the taxi drivers had a significantly larger posterior hippocampus than the bus driver The taxi drivers also performed better in London landmark recognition and proximity to locations

Arguably taxi drivers have more to remember in terms of journey routes, landmarks and places on each street which accounts for this This indicates brain plasticity increases with the more we learn from our environment

Video games

The video games study was a study where the researchers compared a control group with a video game training group that was trained for two months for at least 30 minutes a day on the game super Mario

From kuhn et Al study it was found that there was a significant increase in grey matter in various brain areas including the cortex,hippocampus and cerebellum but the increase was not evident in the control group that didn’t play super Mario

The conclusion is that video game training had resulted in new synaptic connections in brain areas involved in spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory, and motor performance

Meditation

There was 8 tiberian monks who used meditation and there was a control group of 10 student PPs

Meditation seemed to affect the brain of the tiberian monks as they had more gamma wave activity than the control group

This shows us that plasticity works by changing the brain and causing permanent changes