The Dark Side of Neuroplasticity
For the most part this blog has been about the wonder and awe of neuroplasticity. It has been about discoveries in neuroscience that bring hope and joy into the lives of people who just a decade or so ago would be thought to have disorders making their lives miserable and that would likely do so for the rest of those lives. But there is a down side to it all. Neuroplasticity can work in reverse to make your life more difficult. A new study from the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal using, what else, lab rats, shows that the brain tends to reprogram itself in response to stress and that reprogramming can serve to reinforce the behaviors responsible for the stress and causing problems in the first place.
According to the study’s lead researcher Dr. Nuno Sousa in an article in Science magazine, “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be a better approach.”
Take heart though, even though your brain may have rewired itself for the worse, it still has the potential to unlearn these habits and learn new more advantageous ones.
Dr. Sousa said, “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ. Dendrites and synapses retract and reform and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”
Yes, Doige’s book, “the Brain that Changes itself” describes that the learning process works for all sorts of things under the banner. ‘what fires together, wires together’. The human has one advantage over the other mammal, being able to consider neglect as well as attention. So we can choose to neglect / ignore a behavioural response, and to attend to an alternative. Neuroplasticity does seem to work best in people who are still able to give considered attention to a new challenge. Perhaps better as a prevention of alziehmers than a cure.