Neuroplasticidade | por Lara Boyd (TEDx)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so how do we learn and why does some of us learn things more easily than others so as I mentioned I'm dr. Laura Boyd I'm a brain researcher here at the University of British Columbia these are the questions that fascinate me so brain research is one of the great frontiers in the understanding of human physiology and also in the consideration of what makes us who we are it's an amazing time to be a brain researcher and I would argue to you that I have the most interesting job in the world what

we know about the brain is changing at a breathtaking pace and much of what we thought we knew and understood about the brain turns out to be not true or incomplete now some of these misconceptions are more obvious than others for example we used to think that after childhood the brain did not really could not change and it turns out that nothing could be farther from the truth another misconception about the brain is that you only use parts of it at any given time and silent when you do nothing well this is also untrue it

turns out that even when you're at rest and thinking of nothing your brain is highly active so it's been advances in technology such as MRI has allowed us to make these and many other important discoveries and perhaps the most exciting the most interesting and transformative these discoveries is that every time you learn a new factor skill you change your brain it's something we call neuroplasticity so as little as 25 years ago we thought that after about puberty the only changes that took place in the brain were negative the loss of brain cells with aging the

results of damage like a stroke and then studies began to show remarkable amount of reorganisation in the adult brain and the Assuan research has shown us that all of our behaviors change our brain that these changes are not limited by age good news right and in fact they're taking place all the time and very importantly Verena organization helps to support recovery after you damage your brain the key to each of these changes is neuroplasticity so what does it look like so your brain can change in 3 very basic ways to support learning and the first

is chemical your brain actually functions by transferring chemical signals between brain cells what we call neurons and these trigger a series of actions and reactions so to support learning your brain can increase the amount or the concentrations of these chemical signaling that's taking place between neurons now because this kind of change can happen very rapidly this supports short-term memory or the short-term improvement in the performance of a motor skill the second way that the brain can change to support learning is by altering its structure so during learning the brain can change the connections between neurons

now here the physical structure of the brain is actually changing so this takes a bit more time these types of changes are related to long-term memory the long-term improvement in a motor skill now these processes they interact and let me give you an example of how so we've all tried to learn a new motor skill maybe playing the piano maybe learning to juggle you've had the experience of getting better and better within a single session of practice and thinking I've got it and then maybe you've returned the next day and all those improvements from the

day before they're 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 did not induce the structural change that are necessary to support long term memory remember that long term memories take time and what you see in the short term does not reflect learning it's these physical changes that are now going to support long-term memories and chemical changes that support short-term memories structural changes also can lead to integrated networks of brain regions that function together to support learning and they can

also lead to certain brain regions that are important for very specific behaviors to change their structure or to enlarge and so here are some examples of that so people who read Braille they have larger hand sensory areas in their brain than those of us who don't your dominant hand motor region which is on the left side of your brain if you're right-handed is larger than the other side and research shows that London taxi cab drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to get their taxicab license they have larger brain regions devoted to

spatial or mapping memories now the last way that your brain can change to support learning is by altering its function as you use a brain region it becomes more and more excitable and easy to use again and as your brain has these areas that increase their excitability the brain chips how and when they're activated with learning we see that whole networks of brain activity are shifting and changing so neuroplasticity is supported by chemical by structural and by functional changes and these are happening across the whole brain they can occur in isolation from one another but

most often they take place in concert together they support learning and they're taking place all the time so I've just told you really how awesomely neuro plastic your brain is so why can't you learn anything you choose to with these what are our kids sometimes fail in school why as we age do we tend to forget things and why don't people fully recover from brain damage that is what is it that limits and facilitates neuroplasticity and so this is what I study I study it specifically how it relates to recovery from stroke so recently stroke

dropped from being the third leading cause of death in the United States to be the fourth leading cause of death great news right what actually turns out that the numbers of people having a stroke has not declined we're just better at keeping people alive after a severe stroke it turns out to be very difficult to help the brain recover from stroke and frankly we have failed to develop effective rehabilitation interventions the net result of this is that stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability in adults in the world individuals with stroke are younger and

tending to live longer with that disability and research from my group actually shows that the health-related quality of life of Canadians with stroke has declined so clearly we need to be better at helping people recover from stroke and this is an enormous societal problem and it's one that we're not solving 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 dose of practice that's required to learn new and relearn old motor skills it's very large

and how to effectively deliver these large doses of practice is a very difficult problem it's also a very expensive problem so the approach that my research has taken is to develop therapies that prime or that prepare the brain to learn and these have included brain stimulation exercise and robotics but through my research I've realized that a major limitation to the development of therapies that speed recovery from stroke is that patterns of neuroplasticity are highly variable from person to person now as a researcher variability used to drive me crazy it makes it very difficult to use

statistics to test your data and your ideas and because of this medical intervention studies are specifically designed to minimize variability but in my research it's becoming really cool that the most important the most informative data that we collect is showing this variability so by studying the brain after stroke we've learned a lot and I think these lessons are very valuable in other areas so the first lesson is that the primary driver of change in your brain is your behavior so there's no neuroplasticity drug you can take nothing is more effective than practice at helping you

learn and the bottom line is you have to do the work in fact my research has shown that increased difficulty increased struggle if you will during practice ashlee leads to both more learning and greater structural change in the brain the problem here is is that neuroplasticity can work both ways it can be positive you learn something new and you've refined a motor skill it also can be negative though you forgot something you once knew you become addicted to drugs maybe you have chronic pain so your brain is tremendously plastic and it's being shaped both structurally

and functionally but everything you do but also by everything that you don't do the second lesson we've learned about the brain is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning so there's no recipe for learning I consider the popular belief that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to learn and to master a new motor skill now I can assure you is not quite that simple for some of us it's going to take a lot more practice and for others it may take far less so the shaping of our plastic brains is it's far too unique

for there to be any single intervention that's going to work for all of us and now this realization have forced us to consider something called personalized medicine so this is the idea that to optimize outcomes each individual requires their own intervention and the idea comes from cancer treatments and here it turns out that genetics are very important in matching certain types of chemotherapy with specific forms of cancer my research is showing that this also applies to recovery from stroke so there are certain characteristics of brain structure and function that we called biomarkers and these biomarkers

are proving to be very helpful in helping us to match specific therapies with individual patients and the data from my lab suggests it's a combination of biomarkers that best predicts neuroplastic change and patterns of recovery after stroke and that's not surprising given how complicated the human brain is but I also think we can consider this concept much more broadly given the unique structure and function of each of our brains what we've learned about neuroplasticity after stroke applies to everyone behaviors that you employ in your everyday life are important each of them is changing your brain

and I believe we have to consider not just personalized medicine but personalized learning the uniqueness of your brain will affect you both as a learner and also as a teacher and now this idea helps us to understand why some children can thrive in traditional education settings and others don't why some of us can learn languages easily and yet others can pick up any sport and excel so when you leave this room today your brain will not be the same as when you entered this morning and I think that's pretty amazing but each of you is

going to have changed your brain differently understanding these differences these individual patterns this variability and change it's going to enable the next great advance in neuroscience it's going to allow us to develop new and more effective interventions and allow for matches between learners and teachers and patients and interventions and this does not just apply to recovery from stroke it applies to each of us as a parent as a teacher as a manager and also because you're at TEDx today a lifelong learner study how and what you learn best repeat those behaviors that are healthy for

your brain and break those behaviors and habits that are not practice learnings about doing the work that your brain requires so the best strategies are going to vary between individuals you know what they're even going to vary within individuals so for you learning music may come very easily but learning to snowboard much harder I hope that you leave today with a new appreciation of how magnificent your brain is you and your plastic brain are constantly being shaped by the world around you understand that everything you do everything you encounter and everything you experience is changing

your brain and that can be for better but it can also be for worse so when you leave today go out and build the brain you want thank you very much [Applause] you [Music]