Neuroscientists challenge common belief, say our brain can't 'rewire' itself
economictimes.indiatimes.combrain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of sight, an amputation or stroke, for example, neuroscientists say. They argue that the notion that the brain, in response to injury or deficit, can reorganise itself and repurpose particular regions for new functions, is fundamentally flawed, despite being commonly cited in scientific textbooks.
Instead, what is occurring in such scenarios is merely that one's brain is being trained to utilise already existing but latent abilities, the researchers write in an article in the journal eLife.
«The idea that our brain has an amazing ability to rewire and reorganise itself is an appealing one. It gives us hope and fascination, especially when we hear extraordinary stories of blind individuals developing almost superhuman echolocation abilities, for example, or stroke survivors miraculously regaining motor abilities they thought they had lost,» writes John Krakauer, Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins University, US.
«This idea goes beyond simple adaptation or plasticity.
It implies a wholesale repurposing of brain regions. But while these stories may well be true, the explanation of what is happening is, in fact, wrong,» writes Krakauer.
In their article, the neuroscientists look at ten seminal studies that purport to show the brain's ability to reorganise.
One of these studies carried out in the 1980s at the University of California, San Francisco, looked at what happens when a hand loses a finger. The hand has a particular representation in the brain, with each finger appearing to map onto a specific brain region, it said.
The study found that upon removing the forefinger in the hand, the
