Download Neuroplasticity: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series AudioBook Free
Fifty years back, neuroscientists thought that a older brain was set like a fly in amber, struggling to change. Today, we realize our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the creativeness of a general population eager for self-improvement - and has influenced countless Internet business owners who peddle dubious "brain training" video games and apps. In this publication, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the overall listener, explaining how our brains change continuously in response to our actions and experiences. Costandi discusses key experimental conclusions, and explains how our taking into consideration the brain has progressed over time. He explains how the brain changes during development, and the "synaptic pruning" that occurs before brain maturity. He shows that adult brains can increase new cells (citing, among a great many other studies, research showing that sexually older male canaries learn a fresh song every year). He explains the kind of brain training that can result in improvement in brain function. It isn't gadgets and video games that promise to "rewire the human brain" but such sustained cognitive duties as learning a drum or a fresh terms. (Costandi also records that London cabbies increase their grey matter after thorough trained in their city's complicated pavements.) He says how brains compensate after heart stroke or injury; explains habit and pain as maladaptive kinds of neuroplasticity; and considers brain changes that accompany child years, adolescence, parenthood, and aging. Each of our brains is custom-built. Neuroplasticity is at the heart and soul of what makes us human.
