Brain plasticity

Back in Sweden for a few weeks. It’s so cool and quiet over here. It’s quite a difference from the non-stop work mode back in Freo.

I’m observing my Chiropractor in the clinic almost every day and I’m outdoors painting houses a couple of times a week. It’s so green and lush everywhere, a typical Swedish summer.

A new and Swedens first cablepark has opened 1 hour from me so I’ve been hitting it up a couple of times. I really enjoy flying around with my wakeboard. It gets me so pumped. Yesterday I landed over a handful front2blinds, which is my favorite move atm. They look sick, feel sick so hopefully I’ll get them filmed and uploaded here.

Anyways been reading quite a bit about ADHD, brain plasticity and what effect different things have on our magnificent brain. This is the subject that really makes me tick.

So lets write something about what I’ve been reading about and make it into a coherent article?! Cool

Funny thing, my grades on my first three essays at Murdoch was 27, 34, 48%. Something I wanted to learn during my uni years was to write properly and on my most recent essay I got 86%. That’s cool, I think writing this blog has contributed at least a bit towards that.

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I picked up “The brain that changes itself” and read it. One of the many things that were brought up in the book was how in 1969 a neuroscientist; Bach-y-rita did experiments on congenital blind people (born blind). He put together a chair with around 400 vibrators attached to it. He connected a camera to the whole thing and dark areas vibrated a lot where as light areas didn’t. These persons who had never been able to see the world could now point the camera and say that that’s Johnny and he’s mouth is open. These days blind people get to have a small chip on their tongue.

Someone showed me this documentary of a boy who got cancer in his eyes and had them removed when he was 3 years old. He makes a clicking sounds and sees just like a bat, using echoloaction.

Well all these experiments and many more got me interested in what the brain was and what it could really do. The more I read the more I realized that we can make it do some incredible things.

It adapts really well but yes you got to stick with things a little longer then the average commercial break. When we are at the topic of TV I would like to bring to your attention how it affect your 1400gram, oatmeal lump.

More then a hundred studies have shown that the rate at which TV stimulates us is not at the same rate as our normal brain waves are at. But since the brain is so fantastic it rewires to the rate at which the environment gives us stimulation.

How might a child’s brain be impacted by the onslaught of technology-driven activities that are super stimulating to the senses (and therefore the brain) such as videogames? And what is the effect of the 24-hour-a-day “real time” coverage readily available today on television, of unfolding events, and detailed and repetitive visual coverage of disasters and violent crimes?

This rewiring has had some interesting side effects. A 20-years study by The rational Psychology Association in Munich, Germany, looked at the effects of technology on the brain. The study of 4000 subjects every five years yielded some very interesting findings.

In 1980, the study found that it was becoming increasingly harder to stimulate the cerebral cortex. The results indicate that our sensitivity to stimuli is decreasing at a rate of about one percent per year. !!!

My take on this is that we will have a harder and harder time appreciating details and small things in life. Like walking in nature where it’s quiet. Quite a coincident that young people all over the globe walk with ipods plugged in.

Look, I’m not saying that this is bad, maybe we can’t do anything about it but it can certainly contribute to ADHD and ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) which five to fifteen percent of children and adolescents in the United States meet the criteria for. In inner city Detroit and other US cities up to 60% of the children are diagnosed with ADHD.

Our brains are continually molded after what we’re exposed to on a day-to-day basis. I guess not everyone want to chuck out their TV’s and couldn’t really give a damn about things like this but I do think that everyone should get taught it in school somewhere so that everyone is aware of this. That’s only fair.

Another interesting study on London taxi drivers show that their hippocampus gets larger for every year they work as a cabbie. Meditators and meditational teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention. Their amygdala doesn’t fire nearly as easy as on a normal person. The amygdala in an ADHD kid is what fires madly and their cortex is unable to inhibit it – interesting.

A recent study of more that 2600 toddlers shows that early exposure to television between the ages of one and three correlates with problems paying attention and controlling impulses later in childhood. For every hour of TV the toddler watched TV each day, their chances of developing serious attentional difficulties at age seven increased by 10%. Forty–three percent of U.S children two years or younger watch television daily and twenty-five percent have TV’s in their bedrooms.

About twenty years after the spread of TV, teachers of young children began to notice that their students had become more restless and had increasingly difficulty paying attention. When those children entered college, professors complained of having to “dumb down” their courses each new year, for students who were increasingly interested in listening to sound and intimidated by reading of any length.

At the same time it was pushed for more RAM and gigabytes in the class computers instead of the attention spans and memories of the students. The medium that the students get their information from is far more important then the actual message. We process words differently when hearing, reading or vision them. Each medium leads to a change in the balance of our individual senses, increasing some at the expense of others. However it’s not known if this is harmful or not.

Almost everything can be found in either “The brain that changes itself” by Doigde Norman, or “ADD/ADHD DRUG FREE” by Frank Jacobelli and L.A Watson.

Well there is so much to be written on this topic and I find it highly interesting but it’s late and someone just put the TV on and I can’t keep my eyes off it so I better stop writing now and watch some TV before going to bed.