Blog Entry 3 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 

Why can a small glitch in the brain’s circuits be devastating to some people, whereas others can function with major damage? How do experiences in life alter our brains?

To begin, experiences in life altering our brain is called plasticity. It occurs more prominently in childhood due to growth and experiencing many new and different things that they may have not experienced before. It is the brain's ability to change. Plasticity is when the brain reorganizes after being damaged or builds new pathways as you experience more in life. As you grow interests, practice a skill, care more about people that are important to you, or dedicate your devotion to specific ideas your brain changes in reflection to you and what or who you surround yourself with. Your brain continues to work and develop new pathways that correlate to your experiences. With this we as humans are able to adapt to the changes the world continues to bring.

With all this growth and development there has to be a vast amount of communication being done inside our brains that connects to our entire bodies. The building blocks of our bodies are neurons or nerve cells. All neurons consist of a cell body and branching fibers called dendrite cells. These cells relay messages through fibers called axon fibers. Now these are the fibers that act upon the message received from the dendrite fibers to other neurons, muscles, or glands. Surrounding the axons are a fatty layer of myelin sheath. It insulates the axon fibers and speeds up the impulses or messages being relayed throughout the body. It contributes to the growth of neural efficiency, judgment, and self control. With such important jobs come many possibilities of  complication if one thing is out of line or damaged. If damage occurs to dendrite fibers no messages can be carried out to axon fibers thus no message is sent to other neurons, muscles or glands rendering them unable to function. Along goes with the axon fibers and the myelin sheath. A common example is the degeneration of the myelin sheath, this leads to slow communication to muscles eventually losing control of the muscle itself also known as multiple sclerosis. Tiny glitches within our neural communication can have a detrimental effect to our minds and bodies due to the endless connections and pathways that are needed for complete and efficient functioning. 

Now people that may have had major damages occur to the brain are almost a complete different story. Well to me anyway. Damage to the brain or spinal cord usually do not regrow or regenerate. Instead the neural tissue of the brain can reorganize itself in response to the damage. In these larger cases where surgery is needed to remove entire chunks of the brain or severe accidents have occurred where portions of the brain are damaged, the remaining hemispheres can take over the function of what was removed. There are many different cases in this instance. Someone that may be blind will have increased sensitivity in their finger or fingers expanding over and violating the visual cortex, the area in the brain supposed to process sight. In someone that may be deaf who has learnt sign language before any other language will have enhanced peripheral and motion detecting vision. As the area in the brain that detects sound waits for stimulation it looks for other signals to process. There is also a type of therapy called constraint-induced therapy which aims to rewire the brain by restraining what works good and normally forcing the brain functions of what is damaged to relocate to different parts of the brain. So major damage to the brain may have less of an affect to the person due to the adaptations the remainder of the brain can make. Whereas glitches in neural communication can cause more severe damage to the mind and body due to the countless circuits needed for efficiency.