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The Amazing, Incredible Plastic Brain

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Investigation into the \"plastic\" nature of the brain has been occurring since the early 1900\'s, but those in the fields of brain science held fast to the notion that brain cells did not regenerate like the other cells within the body. Now we have discovered that exercise stimulates the production of natural substances that stimulate the growth of nerve cells and increases the number of neural connections in the brain.\" Sometimes it\'s nice to be proven wrong.

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There is noticeable interest in the brain these days, brought on by the discovery of the phenomenon of neuroplasticity that made headlines several years ago. Books, articles, programs, systems and games, have all been created to optimize the newly discovered ability of the brain to create and maintain cells...the stuff of life. The brain is the newest news maker!

Obviously, the brain has always been "plastic" in its ability to adapt, adjust, re-organize and re-assign its functions to changing conditions. We just didn't know it. As we humans often do, in our misguided sense of intellectual reasoning, we assumed that what we were born with (in terms of the physical body), was all there was. After all, you were born with two eyes, and if you lost one through an accident, you didn't grow another one. If you lost a limb, unlike the gecko, who can grow a new tail, you made do with what was left.

Of course, all this was before the advent of transplants and prosthetics. These days, even an entire face can be transplanted from one human to another. Heart transplants, livers, kidneys... these are all common place procedures, with all their risks, pain and sacrifice; they can be done successfully.

We have even discovered the amazing ability of the body to re-assign function, if the normal body part is not available - for instance, envision the patience, determination, practice and just plain grit it takes, for an aspiring artist to create beauty with a paintbrush held between his toes...or his teeth! There is probably no more inspiring example of re-inventing how to do something than Steven Hawking, who with help from other brilliant brains, has developed a method of communicating through a computer program that allows him to speak by pressing a button that chooses words, that are then spoken through a speech synthesizer. Amazing stuff!

Investigation into the "plastic" nature of the brain has been occurring since the early 1900's, although even William James, the father of psychology, used the word plasticity in his famous essay "Principles of Psychology" in 1890. But, the bottom line for those in the fields of brain science held fast to the notion that brain cells did not regenerate like the other cells within the body. Although weight-bearing exercise causes the replenishment of lost bone cells and increased resistance strengthening results in new and beefed-up muscle cells... even our skin sluffs off and reveal new cells, cuts close and heal; we knew that just doing more "thinking" didn't create new brain cells to accommodate the bigger thoughts.

But where does all of this amazing stuff originate? Hmmm, let's see - Oh, I got it! It's the brain! None of these amazing, innovative, creative ways of solving problems could be done without the brain. But what about the brain itself? The new news that has everyone talking, is the discovery that within the brain, re-assignment of function goes on all the time. If the left-side gets damaged, the right side steps up to the plate and takes over the function needed.

Now this is more clever and creative than you might think. It doesn't mean that specific functions are restored literally. If you lose your sight in an explosion, your ears are not going to "see"..... but your brain tells your visual cortex (the part of the brain that processes images taken in through the eyes), to assist the auditory cortex (your ears), in locating direction and distance of sound, with so much more precision, you can practically see where the sound is coming from.

Then the brain tells the body to be so sensitive to vibration and changes in air pressure, you can tell when you are coming close to a solid object, or where other people are in relationship to you. Probably the most amazing example is the young blind teenager, who uses "clicks" with his tongue, to navigate his way around. He had attended high school for some time before other students realized he was blind. He even roller-blades!

So as fabulous and important as all this is, why is the news of the brains plasticity so newsworthy? Well, primarily because one of the mis-conceptions we have held all these years, has been that the brain cells you were born with, was all you got. Period. Worse than that, we believed that as you aged, you systematically lost those brain cells. Now, don't get me wrong, we do lose brain cells, or better said, neuro-cells die off, as do all the cells in the body. It's just that we didn't know there was an on-going replacement system happening all along.

In an article in USA Today in the spring of 1999, there was much excitement about a "new" discovery. They released the news that in 1995, America's foremost brain researchers had gathered in Chicago to examine the link between movement and learning. What they found, according to this article, was that exercise not only creates and strengthens bone, builds muscle mass and improves strength; raises the basal metabolic rate, controls weight and manages disease...It also strengthens the basal ganglia, cerebellum and corpus callosum of the brain. In addition, they discovered that the hippocampus, a part of the brain deep in the Limbic system (our emotional center), actually created about 60,000 new brain cells every day. Wow! This was news, and most importantly, was the fact that the hippocampus is the initial storage and re-assignment area for all of our new memories.

The reason for the creation of these new brain cells appeared to be sustaining aerobic level exercise for a long enough period of time (they initially said an hour at a time), to stimulate the creation of the new cells. It seemed the exercise stimulated the production of neurotrophins, natural substances that stimulate the growth of nerve cells and increase the number of neural connections in the brain".

Exercise creates something called BDNF's, (brain-derived neurotopic factors), that literally create the production of new brain cells, make the "wiring" thicker and stronger, speed up the transmission of signals and a bunch of other miraculous things...so much so, that John Rately, MD, in his ground-breaking book "Spark, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain", labeled BDNF's, Miracle-Gro for the brain! A common factor mentioned in all of these studies was the increased blood flow and oxygen that exercise promoted to the brain.

"As I Live and Breathe..."

Oxygen is essential for cellular life within our bodies. It takes oxygen to break down our food into energy that is used to sustain both body and brain function. Within minutes of the cessation of breath, both the body and the brain will die. The term for decreased oxygen supply to the tissues is hypoxia.. which is the insufficient supply of oxygen necessary to sustain living tissue. It takes oxygen to sustain the life of brain tissue, and it requires movement to provide the necessary amount.

Tragically, our nursing homes and extended care facilities are full of old people trapped in a trance-like state of inertia, due to the lack of physical movement necessary to keep their brains alive.

Although our brains only weigh about one-fifth of our body weight, it requires fifty percent (50%!) of our oxygen. We need to move in order to think, and Dr. Rately proved that the more we move, the better we think. The more complex the movement, the sharper we can be. Just think (ha-ha), about it...Dancing can make you smarter!

So, time to bring this chapter to a close. The next article will be about thinking, and how we have discovered that thinking more (learning), can create bigger thoughts! Sometimes it's nice to be proven wrong.

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