Recently, I've been hearing a company called Luminosity making claims in their ads about their use of neuroplasticity to improve one's memory. So what exactly is neuroplasticity and what does it mean?
Well, neuroplasticity is the simply the ability of the brain rewire itself. In the past, the brain was marginally viewed as hardwired and undadaptable, an idea known as the theory of the unchanging brain. The belief was that the brain could not change after a time in one's life known as the critical period, which occurs during infancy and ends in early childhood. However, scientists realized that the brain has an incredible ability to change and modify itself, especially when it is injured or a part of it becomes dysfunctional.
Neuroplasticity has serious implications for the future and as Norman Doidge, M.D., explains in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself (I highly recommenced reading this if you are interested in neuroscience), it enables "people who had been blind since birth to see again... the deaf to hear... people with strokes that were declared incurable [to] recover... people whose learning disorders [to be] cured and IQs [to be] raised... people [to] rewire their brains with their thoughts, [and] to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas" (Doidge, Preface XIX). Clearly, neuroplasticity is one the most important scientific discoveries and is, in my opinion, the coolest idea of brain science since it allows us to do things we can barely imagine.
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