Biopsychology - Week 3

6. Discuss research into plasticity and functional recovery of the

brain after trauma. (16 marks)

Plasticity refers to the brains ability to change and adapt both

functionally and physically as a result of learning and experience.
The number of synaptic connections in the brain peaks at about
15000 when at 2-3 years of age. This number is twice as many as
found in an adult brain and the process of deleting rarely used
connections and strengthening frequently used ones is known as
synaptic pruning. Recent research has suggested that at any time
in life neural connections can change and be formed as a result of
learning which is known as plasticity. Maguire et al. found that
London taxi drivers who had completed ‘the knowledge’ had a
greater volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus than a
matched control group.

Functional recovery of the brain after trauma is a type of plasticity

which refers to the brains ability to transfer or redistribute functions
from damaged areas to undamaged ones. According to Doidge
(2007), secondary neural pathways are ‘unmasked’ or activated to
enable functioning to continue as it did before the trauma. The
recovery is supported by structural changes which include; axonal
sprouting, reformation of blood vessels and the recruitment of
homologous areas on the opposite side of the brain.

A strength of the theory of plasticity is that it has practical

application and has contributed to the field of neurorehabilitation.
Spontaneous recovery occurs quickly after trauma but this process
slows down after a few weeks therefore forms of physical therapy
are introduced at this point to help the patient recover. There is
also much support from research. Early research (Hubel and Weisel,
1963) involved sewing one eye of a kitten shut and found that the
visual cortex associated with the eye was not idle but continued to
process information from the open eye suggesting that the kitten’s
brain had adapted. Subsequent research has shown that both golf
training and mindfulness has led to brain adaptations. Participants
who took part in an 8-week Mindfullness-Based Stress Reduction
course showed an increase in grey matter in the left hippocampus
(Holzel et al. 2011) and participants aged 40-60 showed reduced
motor cortex activity, suggesting more efficient neural
representations, compared to a control group who had not had 40
hours’ golf training (Bezzola et al. 2012). Due to the age of
participants, Bezzola’s study showed that neural plasticity
continues throughout the lifespan.

However, several factors including the location of the damage, the

individual and the extent of the damage mean that the brain’s ability
to recover varies significantly and so too does each case. This
means that generalisations about plasticity and functional recovery
following trauma are difficult to make. Another issue of recovery
following trauma is that there is often no record of functioning level
prior to trauma. This means that it is difficult to know the extent to
which the brain has recovered to pre-trauma levels. There is also
evidence of negative plasticity, prolonged drug use has been shown
to result in poorer cognitive function as well as increased risk of
dementia (Medina et al 2007) and 60-80% of amputees’ experience
phantom limb syndrome (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998).
7. Discuss ways of studying the brain. (16 marks)

Due to advances in modern science there are now precise and

sophisticated ways of studying the brain. There are scanning
techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI); electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potentials
(ERPs), as well as more traditional post-mortem examinations.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) detects changes in,
and flow of, blood oxygenation. As active regions of the brain
consume more oxygen, more blood is directed to that area in a
process known as the haemodynamic response and this enables
fMRI scans to produce activation maps which show which part of
the brain is involved in specific mental processes.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) record electrical impulses which are

produced by brain activity. Certain conditions of the brain, or
neurological abnormalities, such as epilepsy can be detected by
EEG which measures electrical brain activity by using a skull cap to
fix electrodes to an individual’s scalp. Event-related potentials
(ERPs) use the same equipment as EEG but measure activity in
response to a stimulus. Using a statistical averaging technique
researchers are able to observe only the response to a specific
stimuli or performance of a certain task. Post-mortem examinations
entail examining a brain after death. The aim of which is to
determine whether abnormalities in the brain can be linked to the
behaviours of the patient during their lifetime. The brain in
question is often compared with a neurotypical brain in order to
discover the extent of the difference.
A strength of fMRI is that it can be administered virtually risk free
as it doesn’t use radiation unlike PET scans for example. fMRI also
produce images with high spatial resolution which clearly show how
brain activity is localised. A weakness is that it relies on the person
remaining perfectly still in order to gain a clear image and is
relatively expensive to conduct. A further weakness is that it
cannot show exactly what type of brain activity is represented on
screen as it doesn’t home in on individual neurons. A strength of
EEG is that is has proved invaluable in diagnosing conditions that
effect the brain such as epilepsy. However, the information derived
from EEG is very general in nature and doesn’t allow researchers to
pinpoint the exact source of neural activity.

A strength of ERPs is that they do allow researchers to provide

much more specificity to the measurement of brain activity than
can be derived from EEG data. Due to having excellent temporal
resolution researchers have been able to identify many different
types of ERP, for example the P300 component is thought to be
involved in allocating resources in the working memory. A
weakness however is that it’s difficult to confirm the findings of ERP
as there is a lack of standardisation in methodology between
different research studies. A strength of post-mortem-examinations
is that as the individual is dead there is no discomfort experienced
by them whilst examining their brain. However, as in the case of
HM, participants may not be able to provide consent for the
examination due to their brain damage.