What is neuroplasticity
Before I get into what neuroplasticity means, let me tell you how I first came across it. I had a stroke in 2009 after a car accident at the age of 25.
Five years after that accident I still didn’t understand how a stroke affected people on the inside, emotionally, and cognitively. You only see the physical from the outside but even there, every stroke will strike each individual differently.
Because I still didn’t know exactly what a stroke was, at about 5 years post stroke, I decided to read everything I could find about strokes; the basics, the signs and symptoms, the general deficits people acquired due to a stroke on one side of the brain and the other. I would also dive into treatments, like Botox and therapy interventions, like speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy, and anything and everything to help those recover after a stroke. I read (and still do today) the most recent of research papers and the ‘older’ ones from the late 1990s-2005. And, at that time neuroplasticity really had some breakthrough research going on!
What is Neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s innate ability to rewire itself, to learn (and unlearn) and adapt.
Without the training you received on your first, second, fifth jobs ever you would never have learned to do the job. Neurons fire connections to the various parts of the brain needed to do a task, or action. These connections will begin to build neural pathways. Once we have trained and worked a couple days from that point on it is with consistent repeated actions/processes and neuroplasticity that let us learn our jobs inside and out, how to get faster, know how to answer new questions based on what you’ve learned along the way.
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That a quick intro to what neuroplasticity is but how does it apply to everyday life, for the non-stroke survivor?
Neuroplasticity in stroke recovery
As I stated above neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to learn new things. Which is great news for those who are trying to work on their deficits and re-learn functionality. A stroke actually kills a portion of the brain due to a lack of blood supply. Whatever task that portion of the brain is in control of, it is now possible that it difficult or even impossible to do (for a time, anyway). But with therapy and other interventions, rewiring the brain can teach other portions of the brain to take over and perform the task once again!
Neuroplasticity for everyone
We need the brain to be plastic (moldable), to learn as children, but also through adolescence, school, and adulthood! As we get older, and stay curious, continue reading things, taking deeper dives into the topics that really interest us, our brain is changing the whole time.
We are slowly unlearning (forgetting) the ideas and tasks that we don’t do as often, which is why it may take us longer to do a task when we finally get around to doing it again.
The things we study more about, the tasks we do more often are the neural pathways in the brain that get reinforced.
Neuroplasticity is what is needed every time we learn something new as a baby, and child, a teen, and all through adulthood. It is how we learn our new jobs, and slowly forget how to do the old ones. It is how you can learn something new on YouTube, or Medium and implement it into your own life. The more you do those new things, the stronger the neural pathways get and the better you get at those things.
Stay curious! And happy learning!
