Never Give Up: Healing The Brain, Brain Plasticity

The interesting news about brain injury and aging: specific interventions can encourage brain/dendritic plasticity, brain healing, and

An expert interviewed recently on Post Concussive Syndrome said: "95% of what we know about his disorder has come together in the last 5 years."

I strongly suggest you take a moment click over to review On The Brain, a blog by Dr Michael Merzenich, Francis Sooy Professor in the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at the University of California at San Francisco.

For many years brain deterioration [with a decrease in arborization and plasticity] from injury, age, neurotoxins or stress was considered somewhat inevitable. If dementia arrived, forget it, nothing could be done. The brain was gone.

Here is how he starts his post on the Top Ten Misconceptions about… Cognitive Loss:

For those of you out there banking on that long-promised cure-all memory pill to save your bacon, get over it. The problem, in a nutshell, is that you don’t lose your memory because any single process is defective, or because any single molecule is in short supply. Fixing your problem is not as simple as turning up that dimmer switch, to restore light where there is now only darkness.

And just a bit more – next page

YOU can’t remember because the machinery of your brain has gone through a long, slow, incredibly complicated epoch of change that has enduringly revised its basic parameters of operation. The emergent, older YOU is representing information in your brain is a substantially degraded way, with machinery that has slowly re-adjusted in a rich variety of ways, through plasticity processes, to sustain an acceptable level of performance and control, given that degradation. You can’t really fix this kind of multivariate problem with a chemical tweak. YOU HAVE TO LEARN YOUR WAY OUT OF IT.

And while you are over there just look at his excellent references… Stay tuned for more on neuroplasticity.