Plasticity is highest in the very young and lowest in the very old.

Up to the age of three or four the brain is changing very rapidly as key areas like language develop. If a child is deprived of normal stimulation at that age and those areas do not develop then there is a real struggle to gain those skills even just a few years later. [ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29 for an extreme case ].

Beyond that point the ability of the brain to change and adapt only gradually decreases. There is no magical cut off point when your brain ’sets’ into its adult form.

This is why we can learn things as adult. When you learn anything, from someone’s name to a new language, your brain is changing and displaying plasticity.

Obviously various factors effect plasticity. The “Use it or lose it” theory seems true. So those who have life long habits of learning seem to be the ones best able to recover from strokes and other brain injuries.

Physical health is a factor. Fit, healthy adults recover from brain injury better than fat, unhealthy adults.

The size and nature of what is being learned is the most critical factor. Learning new things, like a foreign language is easy compared to relearning to speak after a stroke.

Have a look at these two cases of adults displaying amazing brain plasticity.

http://www.myomancy.com/2004/07/remembering_to_

http://www.myomancy.com/2006/03/the_incredible_

The thing is though – at 15, I was unable to tie my shoelaces or tell the time, didn’t speak much, & was not really coping with life. At 18, I ran my first marathon, went to Malaysia & New Zealand alone, got straight As & a place at uni, & was responsible for looking after profoundly disabled children. If I’d been doing some sort of programme at the time, I’ve no doubt at all that my parents would have put my improvements down to whatever I was doing. I wasn’t though, & IMO it was mostly a change of environment & teaching styles, having to take a year mostly off school & away from pressures there, being able to use a computer for written work, and being allowed to do the things I was good at instead of focusing on what I couldn’t do. I’m doing lots of things now that Drs, EdPsychs etc said I wouldn’t be able to do – my parents were told I’d not ride a bike, and a couple of years ago I came 3rd in an Ironman triathlon (with 112 mile bike leg) & have worked in a bicycle shop.

Sorry, I’m sounding like a right show-off now, & I don’t mean to. But I know lots of people with SpLD diagnoses who have been successful in their field – I know a dyspraxic & dyslexic medical doctor, a couple of dyspraxic physicists, a Vicar, a research mathematician, several engineers, an architect, all sorts of things, and it worries me that there is an expectation that without DORE then people with SpLDs can’t be successful & happy. Children are very influenced by expectations.

Children do have much greater neural plasticity than adults – they will recover much more quickly from brain injury, but conversely deprivation of stimuli is much more damaging to their development. There’s a certain time period where just covering a child’s eye will leave them blind, as the brain isn’t getting input from that eye so will re-assign those cells to do something else. However, humans are clever things, and adults can also recover after brain injury, though more slowly. Some of it is just learning how to do things a different way, but some is genuine changes in how the brain works. There was a cool study a few years ago about enlarged hippocampi in London taxi drivers, probably because they need good spatial skills (see here: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX032958.html).

Said like a true believer.

“Because the last 30 years of research has shown that the adult brain is plastic and able to change almost as much as a child.”

Now Im no brain surgeon, but I dont believe this. I have heard that in the first few years of life, all brain cells are replaced, and i would imagine this is inline with a persons ability to learn and adapt and this level of change doesnt happen to nearly the same extent in adults.

You would realize the placticity of your own brain should you yourself have an acute onset of nerual deficit due to a stroke, fall, disease, infection, etc. That is of course, should you decide to undergo treatment given your being so against this type of idea.

No brain scientist will debate the placticyt of the brain.

Because it does.

Because the last 30 years of research has shown that the adult brain is plastic and able to change almost as much as a child.