In focus: 'The Teenage Brain' by Jeremy Jones
Please find Jeremy’s next fascinating instalment about the teenage brain below. This week, he is focusing on brain plasticity.
Brain plasticity
It is reassuring to think that brains don’t change very much but as you have hopefully realised over the past 2 weeks, there is a great deal going on inside that skull of yours. Perhaps one of the most fundamental changes of all is encapsulated in the idea of brain plasticity. This is conceptually a difficult idea so hang on in there if you can; or simply come and see me and I will explain face to face. If we go back in evolutionary time it is clear that really the reason we have a brain is fundamentally to allow us to adapt to change, especially changes in our environment. An organism can’t survive on instinct alone if it is to inhabit environments as diverse as the plains of East Africa, the ice deserts of Siberia, the tropical humidity of the amazon basin or the floods and typhoons of the Ganges delta. If you think about it (excuse the obvious pun) then the only way anything can adapt and survive this level of diversity is to evolve an organ that can also adapt; its only prerequisite is to learn about wherever it finds itself. The only precondition is to expect the unexpected and use the resources it finds to allow it to survive. That is essentially what learning is for and as you can imagine we (humans) are bloody good at it; why else are babies’ heads so big, why else do we invest so much effort in nursing babies for so long and why else we would spend so much time in social groups?
That is in essence what brain plasticity is, nothing is fundamentally set in stone; networks in the brain can be reworked and reconnected to suit whatever environment (replace this with: job, school, town, country, friendship group, lover etc) it finds itself in. The important part is that children, unsurprisingly, do this adapting (learning) so much more quickly than adults. Again if you think about it this is obvious; wherever they find themselves will be new so they will have to adapt to it very quickly if they are to survive. It genuinely is easier for a young person to learn the piano or a new language, or learn how to walk a tightrope or how to ski or how to ride a unicycle. Brain plasticity is an absolutely amazing human adaptation and it has allowed us to, in effect; conquer the world, look deep into the universe and the atom, it allows us to produce the wonders of Shakespeare and the musings of Keats but it also means that a person brought up in a violent environment will have a different view on what it means to survive from the person brought up in a rich, varied and loving community. I will leave you to think on that but know that everybody will change depending on their environment.
Jeremy Jones
From the Head
