Thursday, December 4, 2014

Neuroplasticity Can Improve Quality Of Life For Seniors

Barron’s Medical Journal Reporting from Texas Medical Center M.D. Anderson Research Center Houston, Texas USA B. Bobby Graham Reporting

Neuroplasticity Can Improve Quality Of Life For Seniors


Houston ( AP ) Neuroplasticity explains why people who knew me as a elementary student and my ability to learn is so much different as in today, where in many circles when people meet me it is clear to them they are speaking to one of superior abilities.

Neuroplasticity demonstrate that the adult brain can continue to form novel neural connections and grow new neurons in response to learning or training even into old age. Brought To You By Dream So Big Book

Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, is an umbrella term that encompasses both synaptic plasticity and non-synaptic plasticity—it refers to changes in neural pathways and synapses due to changes in behavior, environment, neural processes, thinking, emotions, as well as changes resulting from bodily injury.

The human brain is a complex, self-organizing, biological system, consisting of trillions of interconnected nerve cells called neurons. The operation of neurons results in two distinct forms of information processing: signaling and integration. Each neuron propagates signals Brought To You By JulieBeth HandBags via action potentials, electrochemical currents that travel the length of its axon. This current leads to the release of neurotransmitters which traverse synapses, the gaps between neurons. These chemical messages are received via specialized receptor cells at the ends of numerous, tree-like branches of the receiving neuron, called dendrites. The stimulation of dendritic receptors by neurotransmitters leads to integration, whereby large amounts of information from many neurons is summed up before reaching a threshold to fire the action potential JulieBeth HandBags down the next axon. In this manner, perceptual information from the external environment and the internal milieu of the body is transmitted and processed in the brain, leading to cognition, emotion, and behavior, the essence of human experience.

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The notion that social experience can lead to changes in gene expression was voiced most prominently by Nobel laureate, Eric Kandel, who regarded this observation as the core component of a new paradigm for psychiatry (1998). Kandel summarized the current state of biological thinking with regard to the relation between social experiences and neurobiology, observing that:

The regulation of gene expression by social factors makes all bodily functions, including all functions of the brain, susceptible to social influences. These social influences will be biologically incorporated in the altered expressions of specific genes in specific nerve cells of specific regions of the brain. These socially influenced alterations are transmitted culturally

The brains of infants and children are known to be plastic, undergoing spurts of neuronal development in response to stimulus exposure during critical periods. This development consists of the genesis of neurons, increased connectivity between extant neurons, and the routing of new synaptic connections between previously unrelated neurons. For instance, violinists evidence neural growth in the portion of their somatosensory cortex devoted to their fingering hand through hours of musical practice.

Persons suffering from what was once thought to be permanent brain injury can heal through rehabilitation designed to stimulate the damaged area, such as in the case of stroke However, although largely speculative, it is possible that neuroplasticity may undergird not only rehabilitation of physical illness but that of select psychological disorders as well, mediating natural recovery from mental illness in some cases as well as improvements related to psychosocial interventions. At present, it has been demonstrated that psychotherapy can induce functional changes in brain activation.

The DNA code of the human genome does not determine protein synthesis in a one-toone fashion; instead, genes are subject to epigenetic processes (i.e. modifications that do not occur due to changes in the basic genetic sequence of amino acids but that instead result from biological and environmental influences on the expression of genes as proteins During gene expression, the genetic code serves as a “blueprint” that guides the construction of proteins from amino acids. However, this construction process is modulated by signals from the internal and external environments, which steer and modify the manner in which basic organic molecules are organized into anatomy and physiology. 1. In neuroscience, synaptic plasticity is the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time, in response to increases or decreases in their activity. Plastic change also results from the alteration of the number of neurotransmitter receptors located on asynapse.

Nerve cells communicate by using chemical messengers, which are released from neurons after a “priming” step. It seems that priming may be the key to controlling the strength of chemical transmission. The roots of cognition, behavior, learning and memory are embedded in the brain’s intricate network of nerve cells and their specialized points of contact, the synapses. Synapses can convert electrical impulses into chemical signals and back again, as well as modulate the strength of the transmitted signals. This ability to modify the strength of transmission—known as synaptic plasticity—is thought to be the cellular basis of the brains ability to compute, learn and remember. A goal of many neurobiologists is to understand the molecular basis of synaptic plasticity

Neuroinformatics stands at the intersection of neuroscience and information science. Other fields, like genomics, have demonstrated the effectiveness of freely-distributed databases and the application of theoretical and computational models for solving complex problems. In Neuroinformatics, such facilities allow researchers to more easily quantitatively confirm their working theories by computational modeling. Additionally, neuroinformatics fosters collaborative research—an important fact that facilitates the field's interest in studying the multi-level complexity of the brain.

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There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:[2] 1. the development of tools and databases for management and sharing of neuroscience data at all levels of analysis,

2. the development of tools for analyzing and modeling neuroscience data,

3. the development of computational models of the nervous system and neural processes.