“Our results make sense from a brain plasticity perspective,” says Dempsey-Jones. “If you don’t use your toes separately in action, your brain does not need to represent each toe separately. The results also make sense given our primate cousins have organized toe maps, in a similar brain position and orientation to the artists.”
Overcompensating
Another study conducted around the same time looked at how individuals who are born blind can use portions of the brain typically reserved for vision to perform audio-related tasks. For some time, it was thought that people who lost one of their senses such as sight or hearing somehow compensated with improved performance in the ones they didn’t lose — improved hearing or smell, for example.
Dr. Rita Loiotile of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences sought to understand why that is, and took brain scans of congenitally blind people as they listened to a book on tape or the audio soundtrack of a movie. As the test subjects immersed themselves in these activities, portions of the cerebral cortex in the occipital lobe and associated primarily with processing visual information began to light up in the fMRI.
Loiotile decided to take things a step further and in a subsequent study, she looked at a full cortex analysis of the brains of both participants who were blind, and sighted participants who wore a blindfold. Both groups were given audio-movie clips to watch and a recorded story to listen to from Audible. The majority of blind participants tuned into the visual portions of the cerebral cortex as they listened, but unlike their sighted counterparts, both hemispheres of their brain move in synchronization, with tissue from the visual cortex being repurposed for everyday tasks that don’t require intake of visual information — suggesting that changes take shape over an extended period of time.
This is also hardly limited to matters of vision. In yet another study, researchers from Spain found that when regions of the brain’s left hemisphere involved in language development and processing sustain damage during childhood, unused regions in the right brain can quickly adapt to process language functions — this dispensing with another popular myth we have of the left brain and right brain performing specific tasks independently of each other.
Making the Most of Neuroplasticity
It’s never been much of a secret that regular, vigorous exercise is good for the body — but the evidence continues to build that it’s good for the mind as well — particularly when it comes to high intensity interval training and continuous sessions of moderate exercise. A study from the University of South Australia demonstrates that doing between 20 minutes of interval training or 25 minutes of continuous moderate aerobic exercise could cause considerable changes in the brain’s neuroplasticity, giving it the best opportunities to rewire.
Their findings came after multiple experiments involving 128 people as test subjects who had performed a single bout of aerobic exercise on a stationary bike and treadmill, with workouts that would bring their heart rates between 50 to 90 percent intensity.
“Long-term studies demonstrate that people who engage in regular exercise show greater neural connectivity that those who are sedentary. Research also shows that exercising before learning a new motor skill can help a person learn it much faster,” says Smith’s Ph.D. student Maddison Mellow who helped her with the study.
