What is brain Plasticity? How does it work? And what You can do to enhance the plasticity of your brain!
Enhancing the plasticity of the brain: Max Cynader at TEDxStanleyPark
17minutes and 22seconds
1. What is brain Plasticity?
The process by which way your brain changes depending on what has happened to it.
It includes memory, but also the process in which your brain learns a new skill(skii, sodoku, languages)
The process by which you recover from brain damage of various sorts(trauma, strokes)
and the process by which you adapt to changes in your physiology and psychology.
That is brain plasticity!
-Max Cynader
TLDR;
Summarized in the following slogan:
Neurons that fire together Wire together, Continuity breeds Connectivity!
a lesson learned in the last 20-30 years or Neuroscience research.
2. How does brain plasticity work?
Focus on memory, What is it?
Nothing more than your ability to reconstruct the whole from a degraded fragment
Reconstruct your grandmother. Remember.
Her skin. Color of her clothes. Visual(pictures, events) Auditory(sound). Her smell. Her cooking. Your story.
What do we need to remember a memory?
Maybe a picture, piece of music. That is why "A picture is Worth a 1000 words". Because people deconstruct the pieces and form new puzzles :)
~5:30min
Wow, genes from jellyfish added to neurons so they are visible :|
soma/cell body, axon/sender, dendrite/receiver
If we make those two neurons associate the connection between them will get stronger. And we are understanding the mechanism by which that works.
So how do they connect?
Well, they connect at the synapse"terminal".
3. What the synapse looks like?
~7min
receptors are important,
- for the AMPA receptor more is more. So weak stimulation = weak response.
- NR receptor/NMDA responds differently: If the stimuli is weak the response is negative.If the stimuli is stronger, however, the response is different. It activates the production of more AMPA receptors. In that way, the synapse becomes stronger.
Core mechanism of memory:
Strengthening connections between two neurons, how strong inputs and contiguity can result in a stronger synapse. And that is how you will remember today's lecture :)
4. How to improve your memory?
Let's look at the Hippocampus. All those outside stimuli(smell, taste, ..) funnel down towards the Hippocampus. Which represents the memory trace compressed, in a higher form. That is the basis of long-term memory. Memories formed and reproduced "saved" in a decentralized network :D Have to check long/short term memories to be sure.
~10min studying the Hippocampus. and some story about animal research at MIT circa ~2003 by Matt Willson
and the start of research on dreams. What happens when we dream? Nothing much. Just reverse engineering the memories. In that way strengthening those connections made during the day.
Get a good night's sleep,
Exercise! double to triple your brain cell production.
What does it do, Turns on the plasticity and turns on your Hippocampus!
Cardio and resistance training. Walks, Runs, and Weights Training in short
That is how you improve your memory! :)
Maybe here I can plug my older post №2-Answer to life: Train and Think
~15 Pathways of the brain and how they change and of course how we can get into them :)
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - BrainSight
Nowadays we can strengthen pathways by stimulating the brain.
We can arrange the contiguity.
16:30 Max Cynader's ending point.
Introducing the next big Thing, VR with lemons. I mean VR with an array of magnets to stimulate taste smell touch. So a truly horrifying experience is close at hand. Enjoy your unmapped brains while it lasts. :D
I claim ownership and patents :) :D
Meh :D
What a great review of this talk... I guess I must be highly positively biased as this is a TEDx Talk after all! ;)
I definitely love the line:"Neurons that fire together Wire together, Continuity breeds Connectivity!" There's so much content in there, it is breathtaking in itself.
I have always been fascinated by neurology as the sources of my experiences have to go through its filter. I am still amazed at the sheer size of our brain and, as you point out at the end of your article, the near future is going to be quite interesting with the development of neuro-mapping.
A point to underline and be aware of, the experience of dreams that the author relates to is extremely narrow and might have been a necessary objective to reach in order for the study to find relevance. One doesn't have to go far to come to the quick realization that dreams go far beyond the daily experience or its relations.
I will speak by experience here, though not the most common of people in relation to that. I have kept close records of my dreams and dream states since I was about 4 years old and, over the past 41 years have done a "few" experiments myself in relation to this. Results unforeseeable came countless times. To test it out, I had to make sure the results could be reproduced. Depending on the nature of the dreams, some can be voluntarily reproduced, and therefore easily tested and kept as data for further studies later.
Some dreams reproduce themselves without willfulness prying it to happen, as it usually stops it from happening in these instances. And some are in an in-between intentional willfulness and the other half comes from well beyond oneself... Anyway, it is a long, very long discussion. LOL!!! :)
Again, thanks again for a very good article shared with us all. All for one and one for all!
Namaste :)
Oh yes, I agree with you I'm biased myself, even stopped watching TED's for 3-4-5 years after that much of vigorously finding life's meaning every day in TED's(TV didn't cut it and I was a sad kid :D, so when I wasn't playing alone on the computer I was watching TED's and getting fascinated by the many many topics :) they used to be quite qualitative. "School kills creativity" "What is consciousness" .. "City planning" "Psychology" and .... , then I did get biased :D because I saw how most were narrow specialists and with a firm "understanding" of their world on which they have overlayed whatever they can to get through life.
Then I got tired of TED's and their quality shifted. Not much to watch 5 times day, so it went to 5 talks a year. Sure it's mainstream, sure they have their own understandings. But most people mean well, at least they think they do :D
And I agree with you on dreams, can't imagine what you use to keep those records, I for one have tried or at least tell myself I should write my dreams, but I sadly don't seem to follow up on that promise.
Have to say there are many kinds of dreams, the ones you are reviewing your day at the rat maze, the ones that bring you to a place where I'm not sure how to say it, "people are" I'm not sure what to say, but I've met with people that I've forgotten in real life, dunno I'm a newbie with dreams :D , almost have no rhyme or reason, can't even understand or remember them properly :D.
Anyways you are right and I'm grateful you pointed that out, more people should hear that their life isn't just Input Output(Binary) but that there is a vast network of interconnected layers, that work off each other in some way. So it's not just what happened today because that has no meaning/connection to what will happen next month and you just dreamt that, but you still don't know it, kind of way.
And I agree with you dreams are a TLDR; subject ;) I would like to learn more about.
One last thing I normally go on long rants and let my post get long, so this time I decided to stick to the subject at hand and still the "others" tend to pop up I'm quite fascinated with brain power and have been for years :)
So thank you for the comment and the "good review" :), maybe we can get a grip on dreams :D.
I'm nowhere near that level, so far I tend to write down some dreams and even then if I don't replay them tey seem do disappear, I was wondering if wen people "die and have their life flash by, " do their dreams flash by too :D ?
Also, I did ask myself what it would be like if I remembered my life and my dreams, so far I'm 70-80% conscious of my life. And about 5% of the dreams. Kind of a letdown, but dreams are insane. Can't even imagine how they form :D
Cheers! and yes 0=1 and 1=0 :D all for one and one for all
have mind will transcend.
Fascinating ... what is it within all this that gives us long-term memory (I can still recite poetry from 40 years ago) and meddles with the short-term (I get introduced and the name has shot out the opposite ear)? Even with story telling techniques I can struggle! Or is is just a case of overloading the hard drive?
Upped, have a great weekend. Namaste!
Great!!!
Learned a lot....I need to get more night sleep.
upped and Now following
Thank you! There are two videos on the topic of memory and how to build it up and the previous on "the "Bulletproof" way ":D sorry for the double quotations, Dave seems like a nice guy I just don't like marketing :D, He's also on here, apparently @lifeworship , there is a great summation post on how to improve the functions of the body. Also linked in my comment.
Thanks for the follow, followed back and will check on your posts sometime in the near future.
GL HF :D, Good Luck, Have fun ~!~ have fun earning/learning :)