In my NEUR 101 course with Dr. Cavanaugh, one of the most interesting phenomena I learned about was learning and memory and the types of changes they can induce in a human brain. The fascinating aspect of synaptic plasticity is that there is not only a biological change that occurs at the molecular level but also synaptic plasticity occurring in many different scopes of the brain. There are many larger scope ways that synaptic plasticity works in the human when there is learning, and memory involved. As learned in the literature, when the brain changes to accommodate learning, the brain can change the number of dendritic spines, develop new neural pathways, and reorganize existing pathways. The reason why I chose this topic to delve deeper into was because Dr. Delgado’s research of synaptic plasticity intrigued me, so I wanted to research further as to where, when, and why synaptic plasticity has an application.
According to Dr. Delgado’s article, “Pin1 Binding to Phosphorylated PSD-95 Regulates the Number of Functional Excitatory Synapses”, we have deduced that there are certain proteins that play a larger role in synaptic plasticity and learning (Delgado 2020). Certain modifications to these proteins (phosphorylation) can also be another way that synaptic plasticity acts in the brain. There was some research I was involved with which implores the idea of synaptic plasticity in individuals with Aphasia. Aphasia is a neurological disorder that results from damage to sections of the brain which are responsible for speech production. In Stark et. al article, “Brain Activation in Chronic Left Hemisphere Stroke During a Semantic Decision-Making Task”, Dr. Stark talks about how the brain undergoes a lot of recovery and reorganization after a stroke. The interesting phenomenon is that even though patients have large, damaged areas in their brain, they can conduct a certain behavioral task given by the researchers with over a 70 percent accuracy rate (Wilson, 2018). How is this possible? The phenomenon of synaptic plasticity. The gap in the literature is how the brain reorganizes language pathways itself. Through fMRI research and an adaptive tasking problem, researchers were able to measure how the brain reorganizes its ability to process language after a stroke. The results of this research showed that the control group produced significant brain activation in the left hemisphere (Broca’s Area & posterior temporal cortex). The stroke group produced more bilateral brain activation in parallel regions of the brain, showing once and for all, the process of synaptic plasticity happening in real-time.
Most recently, the research I have been involved in is another Aphasia lab. The study taking place at Shirley Ryan, under Dr. Cherney, is called the MIDAS project, a study regarding the efficacy of computerized script training to treat Aphasia. However, specifically, this MIDAS project studies the effects of changing parameters of speech-language treatment (training volume and scheduling) of individuals with post-stroke aphasia (Cherney, 2019). Even in this research, the researchers are playing on the phenomenon of practice and learning in order to perfect and better the treatment of patients with Aphasia using synaptic plasticity phenomena.
Our brain is constantly evolving daily. Whether it may be through the increased AMPA receptors as referenced by Dr. Delgado, or whether it may be the various other occurrences at both the molecular and larger level. In these examples, we can see how language is a very important feature of human communication, and the brain is heavily implicated in constantly learning and bettering its processing, hence it is an area of study that has lots of roots in synaptic plasticity. However, there is a lot more application to Synaptic Plasticity, a growing field, with a lot to yet be discovered.
Citations:
Leora R. Cherney, Emily J. Braun, Jaime B. Lee, Masha Kocherginsky & Sarel
Van Vuuren (2019) Optimising recovery in aphasia: Learning following exposure to a single dose
of computer-based script training, International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 21:5,
448-458, DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2019.1661518
Wilson, S. M., Yen, M., & Eriksson, D. K. (2018). An adaptive semantic matching paradigm for reliable and valid language mapping in individuals with aphasia. Human brain mapping, 39(8), 3285–3307. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24077
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