Read me and your brain will never be the same again
Hello everyone, article 1006
Today I will try to explain to you, in my usual simple '' bar '' language, how the brain learns anything.
I hope that at least once in the street you have asked yourself these questions:
How do we learn?
And above all ... why do some of us learn things more easily than others?
These are the questions that have always fascinated me.
Brain research is one of the great frontiers in understanding human physiology and also in considering what makes us who we are.
It's a great time to be a brain researcher and it's the most interesting job in the world for me.
What we know about the brain has changed and is changing at a breathtaking pace.
Much of what we thought we knew and understood about the brain turns out to be untrue or incomplete.
Some of these misconceptions are more obvious than others.
For example, we thought that after infancy the brain did not change.
It turns out that nothing could be further from the truth.
Another misconception about the brain is that you only use parts of it at any given time and it is silent when you do nothing.
Well, this is also not true.
It turns out that even when you are at rest, relaxed and not thinking about anything, your brain is very active.
So have been advances in technology, such as MRI. ( Magnetic Resonance (MRI) is a type of scan that doctors use to look at the bones, tissues, and organs inside the body. MRI uses strong fields. magnetic and radio waves to create extremely detailed images, much more detailed than a computed tomography (CT) scan or X-ray. This can be very useful when making a diagnosis or planning surgery. In our case we are talking about MRI brain: often used to evaluate brain damage following injury or stroke, to detect tumors or to diagnose degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. ), this has allowed us to make these and many other important discoveries.
And perhaps the most exciting, most interesting and transformative of these discoveries is that every time you learn a new fact or skill, you change your brain .
Just 25 years ago, we thought that after puberty, the only changes that could occur in the brain were negative: the loss of brain cells with aging, the result of damage, such as a stroke.
And then, the studies started showing significant amounts of reorganization in the adult brain.
And subsequent research has shown us that all of our behaviors change our brains.
That these changes aren't limited by age, that's good news, isn't it?
And in fact, they occur throughout the lifespan.
And most importantly, the reorganization of the brain helps support recovery after events that have damaged it.
Then?
What's on your mind now?
Interesting?
Your brain can change in three basic ways to support learning.
And the first is chemical.
So your brain actually works by transferring chemical signals between brain cells, what we call neurons and this has triggered a series of actions and reactions.
So, to support learning, your brain can increase the amount or concentrations of these chemical signals that are happening between neurons.
Since this change can happen quickly, this supports short-term memory or short-term performance improvement of a motor skill.
The second way the brain can change to support learning is by altering its structure.
So while learning, the brain can change the connections between neurons.
Here, the physical structure of the brain is actually changing so this takes a little longer.
These types of changes are related to long-term memory, the long-term improvement of a motor skill.
These processes interact with each other.
Let's see how.
We've all tried to learn a new motor skill, maybe paint a picture, maybe learning to juggle.
You have had the experience of getting better and better with every single practice session and thinking "I have learned".
You come back the next day and all those improvements from the day before are lost.
What happened?
Well, in the short term, your brain was able to increase the chemical signaling between your neurons.
For some reason, those changes didn't induce the structural changes needed to support long-term memory.
Remember that long-term memories take time. (Or long-term programming like EMAICE)
What you see in the short term does not reflect learning.
It is the physical changes that will support long-term memories and chemical changes that support short-term memories.
Structural changes can also lead to integrated networks of brain regions that work together to support learning.
You can think of integrated networks as motorway links connecting two or more motorways.
They can also lead to certain regions of the brain that are important for very specific behaviors to change your structure or make it bigger.
Let's take some examples.
Those of us who can read Braille have larger sensory areas of the hand in the brain than those of us who don't.
Your dominant hand motor region, which is on the left side of the brain if you are right handed, is larger than the other side.
Research shows London taxi drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to obtain a taxi license, have larger brain regions dedicated to spatial or mapping memories.
The last way your brain can change to support learning is by altering its function.
As you use one region of the brain it becomes more and more excitable and easier to use again.
And since your brain has these areas that increase their excitability, the brain changes how and when they are activated.
With learning, we see that entire networks of brain activity are changing and changing.
So neuroplasticity is supported by chemical, structural and functional changes and these are happening throughout the brain.
They can occur in isolation one or the other, but most of the time they take place in concert.
Together, they support learning.
They take place all the time.
We just mentioned how incredibly neuroplastic your brain is.
Why can't you easily learn everything you choose?
Why do our children sometimes fail in school?
Why do we tend to forget things as we get older?
And why don't people fully recover from brain damage?
In short, what is it that limits and facilitates neuroplasticity?
We enter into a particular case of how we relate to recovery from a stroke.
Stroke in Italy is the second leading cause of death.
The number of people who have strokes hasn't decreased.
Today, we're just better at keeping people alive after a severe stroke.
It is very difficult to help the brain recover from a stroke.
And frankly, no effective rehabilitation interventions have been developed.
The net result of this is that stroke is the leading cause of long-lasting disability in adults worldwide;
stroke individuals are younger and tending to live longer with this disability and research actually shows that the health-related quality of life of Italians with stroke has decreased.
So clearly we need to be better at helping people recover from stroke.
This is a huge social problem and we are not solving it.
So what can be done? 
One thing is absolutely clear: the best driver of neuroplastic change in your brain is your behavior.
The problem is that the dose of behavior, the amount of practice needed to learn new and relearn old motor skills, is very large.
How to effectively administer these large doses of practice is a very difficult and very costly problem.
So what to do?
Developing therapies that trigger or prepare the brain for learning such as brain simulation, exercise, and robotics.
A major limitation to the development of therapies that accelerate stroke recovery is that the patterns of neuroplasticity are highly variable from person to person.
When you approach a human being, the key word is variability.
Each approach to the patient must be personalized.
Statistics are not used to test your data and ideas.
Medical intervention studies are specifically designed to minimize variability, but this still remains very high.
So by studying the brain after stroke, what have we learned new?
1) The main driver of change in your brain is your behavior, there is no neuroplasticity drug you can take.
Nothing is more effective than practice in helping you learn, and the bottom line is that you have to do the work.
You learn something new and hone a motor skill.
There can also be negative learning, you forget something you once knew, you become addicted to drugs, maybe you will experience chronic pain.
The brain is tremendously plastic, and it has been shaped both structurally and functionally by everything you do, but also by everything you don't.
2) There is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning.
So there is no recipe for learning.
There is a popular belief that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to learn and master a new motor skill.
I can assure you it's not that simple.
For some of us it will take a lot more practice and for others it might take a lot less.
So our brain is too unique for there to be a single intervention that will work for all of us.
So you have to consider something called personalized medicine .
This is the idea that to optimize results each individual requires their own intervention.
The idea actually comes from cancer treatments.
Here it turns out that genetics are very important in pairing certain types of chemotherapy with specific forms of cancer.
This also applies to stroke recovery.
There are certain features of the structure and function of the brain called biomarkers.
These biomarkers are proving very useful in combining specific therapies with individual patients.
The combination of biomarkers better predicts neuroplastic change and recovery patterns after stroke.
And that's not surprising, given how complicated the human brain is.
But I also think we can look at this concept in a much broader way.
One thing is certain.
Neuroplasticity after stroke applies to everyone.
The behaviors you employ in your daily life are important.
Each of them is changing your brain.
I believe we need to consider not just personalized medicine but personalized learning.
The uniqueness of your brain will affect you as both a student and a teacher.
This idea helps us understand why some children can thrive in traditional educational settings
and others don't.
Because some of us can learn languages easily yet, others can learn any sport and excel.
So when you finish reading my article today, your brain will never be the same as it was when you got up this morning. 
Surprising right?
Each of you will have changed your brain differently.
Understanding these differences, these individual patterns, this variability and change
it will enable the next major advance in neuroscience.
It will allow us to develop new and more effective interventions and enable a better relationship between students and teachers and patients and doctors.
This doesn't just apply to stroke recovery, it applies to each of us, as a parent, teacher, manager, and even as a lifelong student.
Study, no matter what, and learn better.
Repeat those behaviors that are healthy for your brain and stop those behaviors and habits that are not.
We summarize the instructions for use.
Learning is doing the work your brain requires.
The best strategies vary from individual to individual.
They will also vary within individuals.
So for you learning music can come very easily, but learning to swim is much more difficult.
Your brain is great.
You and your brain are constantly being shaped by the world around you.
You understand that everything you do, everything you encounter and everything you experience is changing your brain.
And this can be for the best, but it can also be for the worse.
So, get started, get out there and build the brain you want.
Mauro Brocca
Per approfondire:
 | Alle frontiere della neuroscienza: storie di persone che hanno cambiato il proprio cervello  € 21,00  |
 | Un programma alimentare per proteggere il cervello e rafforzare la memoria  € 18,00 |
 | Libera il potere della mente € 14,90 |
 | Come fanno le persone comuni a realizzare cose straordinarie € 15,90 |
 | Riprogramma la tua vita, cambia il tuo destino € 23,50 |
