Neuroplasticity is correction masquerading as discovery. The corrected error is that in most of the 19th and 20th centuries neurology operated under the assumption that the adult brain is a finished product.
In 1906, the Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced what became one of the fundamental principles of neuroscience: “In the centers of adults, nerve pathways are fixed, finite, unchanging. Everything can die, nothing regenerates.”
This edict has been repeated in textbooks, taught in medical schools, and used by neuroscientists for the better part of a century. Until the 1990s, clinicians treating brain injuries operated on Cajal’s assumption that what was lost was completely gone—the adult brain, unlike bone or muscle, cannot reorganize or regrow. The brain you had at twenty-five was the brain that would die with you. period
Scientific Evidence Revealing Neuroplasticity
As it turns out, this was completely wrong. Research since the 1960s has shown that the adult brain constantly changes itself in response to experience: synaptic connections strengthen or weaken based on patterns of activation, dendritic structures expand or contract, and new neurons are formed throughout life in certain regions—particularly the hippocampus. This is a real scientific correction of a real scientific error, and it is important how clinicians treat stroke patients. addiction, depressionand others traumas and distortions.
But let’s look at another word associated with this discovery: “connect” or “reconnect”. There are no wires in the brain. Neurons are not cables and the brain is not a circuit board. Indeed, electrochemical thresholds, synaptic efficacy, and the density of receptor proteins that cells encounter change. “Rewiring” is an engineering metaphor embedded in biology, and “neurons firing together” is a bumper sticker rather than a scientifically accurate description. “Wires” is a metaphor that replaces complex, poorly understood electrochemical processes with plausible images of a machine that can be updated and optimized. are we coming sorry I have a grudge about “wires”, but no one does science any favors by using the wrong metaphors.
How “Neuroplasticity” Became a Pop Culture Buzzword
Similarly, the word “neuroplasticity” moved from the laboratory to the bookshelf in the early 2000s, and its meaning has almost completely changed. In the laboratory, he named a specific set of measurable, localized synaptic mechanisms; inside self help in the department and at yoga studios across the country, this represents the approximate possibilities. “I’m expanding my corpus callosum right now!” I heard one teacher claim that she was a Broadway student who had finally gotten her chance to go on stage.
And inside therapy and coaching in offices, neuroplasticity has become something like a bill: the brain can change, so you can change, so the program, app, treatment, or retreat you’re being sold will make those changes. The word does three things marketing campaigns: that change is possible (true), that a particular intervention will produce a particular change (not scientifically proven), and that the change produced is the change you asked for (maybe, maybe not).
This brings us to the real problem: it is used by almost everyone outside the laboratory because neuroplasticity at the individual level is completely untestable. Attributing the causality of an external event to a group of neurons in one’s brain is not even science fiction. Mine or not meditation The practice really changed the thickness of my prefrontal cortex, undetectable. I had to be in the fMRI machine before and after the intervention, my scans were read by someone who could distinguish neuronal reorganization from other changes, and all other variables had to be held constant. And yet, establishing direct causality between meditation and any observed change poses a methodological problem that most neuroimaging studies have not addressed… sample sizes are very small, there is almost never a control group, effect sizes are often negligible, and replication is imprecise at best.
I’ve never heard anyone utter the word “neuroplasticity” in public, let alone own an fMRI machine. No one has any before and after intervention studies… I’ve actually heard better scientific evidence for leech.
OK, so the brain is dynamic and constantly changing in response to experience. This claim is true—to the best of our knowledge—but doesn’t that make the word “neuroplasticity” redundant? We don’t need a special word for dynamic brain any more than we need a special word for wet water. This word works if we still contrast it with the static brain according to Cajal’s judgment – a completed, unchanging, fixed and finished structure that does not exist.
“Neuroplasticity” is a mistake-based word created for correction. The bug has been fixed, but the word remains. Change the word “Earth” to “round earth” and walk around for a week and notice if people give you weird looks.
We should consider the word “neuroplasticity” a misnomer.
