Did you know that our brains are plastic? No, they aren’t made of the same material as bottled water. To clarify, the human brain is not made of plastic, but it is plastic, meaning, it has the ability to change throughout the course of a life.
Neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, refers to the brain’s ability to change over time. There are, on average, a minimum of 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses, within the human brain. That’s 1,000 times more than the number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, which experts estimate to contain approximately 100 billion stars.
This amazing ability of the human brain to reorganize itself by forming new connections is dependent upon genetic factors, the external environment and the actions of each person. Neuroplasticity occurs at the beginning of life when the brain organizes itself, when there is a traumatic brain injury, and throughout adulthood whenever something new is learned and memorized.
As is the inherent nature of science, we’re finding just how much we collectively have left to learn, not only about our own bodies, but generally everything else as well. For the longest time, the consensus was that, as we aged, the connections in the brain became fixed and ultimately faded. The latest research, however, indicates that the brain never stops changing through learning.
Did you know that when a person becomes an expert within a specific domain, the areas of the brain that deal with that expertise will continue to grow? As an example, a study conducted by Eleanor Maguire of University College London showed that London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than London bus drivers. This is odd, right? Well, the hippocampus is a specialized region of the brain that acquires complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate throughout the entire city while bus drivers simply follow a limited set of routes.
