A January article in the online Journal, Behavioral Medicine Report and a study published in the Journal “Nueron” describe new understandings about the synaptic connections that underlie what we commonly call “neuroplasticity.”

In an informative article, Study Shows Map of Brain Connectivity Changes During Development, Christophey Fisher, PhD, points to two important issues:

“Connected highways of nerve cells carry information to and from different areas of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Scientists are trying to draw a complete atlas of these connections – sometimes referred to as the “connectome” – to gain a better understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease.”

…

“Another surprise was that when growing dendrites go searching for potential partners, they reach out to axon boutons that had previously connected with other dendrites – “as if they were attracted to a restaurant that already has a line at the door, rather than trying a brand new one,” says Cline.”

These observations reinforce the work that Frank Belgau describes in Chapter 26 of his book A LIFE IN BALANCE. The Learning Breakthrough Program is based on Belgau’s model about the entrainment potential of synaptic responses (trainability). His design of a variable difficulty balance challenge combined with repetitive perceptual motor skills activities gives us a real world training tool to effect neuroplasticity changes.

For detailed technical information refer to Dynamic Formation of Functional Networks by Synchronization.

How juggling rewires your brain | COSMOS magazine.

PARIS: Neuroscientists have discovered that learning to juggle causes changes in white matter, the nerve strands which help different parts of the brain communicate with each other.

University of Oxford researchers recruited 48 healthy young adults who were unable to juggle and put them in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to get a cross-section map of their brain.

Half the volunteers then underwent a six-week training period to learn how to juggle, during which they were also encouraged to practice for 30 minutes a day.

At the end, they were all able to perform at least two cycles of the classic three-ball “cascade.” They were then scanned again, as were their 24 non-juggling counterparts.

Among the juggling group, imaging showed important changes in white matter, the bundle of long nerve fibres that carry electrical signals between nerve cells and connect different areas of the brain. So-called grey matter consists of areas of nerve cells where the brain processes information.

The findings, published online on Sunday by Nature Neuroscience, are important, for they suggest the brain remains “plastic” – or mobile and adaptable – beyond childhood.

via How juggling rewires your brain | COSMOS magazine.

Here is a solid article that describes the arc of knowledge development that surrounds ADHD interventions, and brings the cognitive paradigm to the forefront in a very thoughtful manor.

The second to last paragraph points to current cerebellar studies which is of course our area of focus.

When the cognitive paradigm became dominant, inattention became the focus of ADHD, and disorder was renamed attention deficit disorder (ADD). Two subtypes would later appear in the literature, which correspond to ADD with or without hyperactivity. The diagnostic nomenclature reflects the notion that the primary problem was an attentional (and thus, cognitive) one and not primarily behavioral. The attentional problems had to do with the ability to shift attention from one stimulus to another (something that Jonah Lehrer has called an attention-allocation disorder, since it isn’t really a deficit of attention). The hyperactivity symptoms were also reformulated as cognitive: connected with an executive processing deficit termed “freedom from distractibility.”

In DSM-IV, published in 1994, the subtypes were made standard and there wasn’t much change in the diagnostic criteria per se, but there were changes in the name of the disorder, which reflected changes in the literature in terms of the understanding of the etiology of the disorder. The term ADD did not hold up, and the disorder became known as ADHD, with three subtypes: ADHD with hyperactivity/impulsiveness, ADHD with inattention, and a combined subtype in which patients have both hyperactive and attention-related symptoms. Due to improved neuroimaging technology, these subtypes seem to reflect structural and functional abnormalities found in the frontal lobe, and in its connections with the basal ganglia and cerebellum.

The set of the symptoms associated with ADHD seem not to have changed much in the last one hundred years. However, paradigm shifts within the field of psychopathology have changed the way in which researchers understand the underlying causal factors, as well as which of the symptoms are thought to be primary.

via What is ADHD? Paradigm Shifts in Psychopathology | Child’s Play.

From the upcoming release of A Life In Balance: Discovery of a Learning Breakthrough

The Still-Missing Core

“One of the basic principles of a two-engine airplane is the synchronicity between the two engine systems that are fixed on either side of the plane. If one engine puts out more thrust than the other, it causes problems in flight. If the disparity is sufficiently severe, it can cause the plane to go out of control and crash.  Remembering this principle caused an idea to begin to percolate: was the issue these children were experiencing related to the balance between the two sides of their bodies?”

“In the mid-1960s, It was not a popular idea to look for learning ability in the body, but the more I observed the children in my classroom, the more the two problems seemed corollary. And why shouldn’t they be? The movement of the body through space is defined by brain functions, just as the ability to read and do arithmetic are defined by brain functions. If the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, wouldn’t it make sense that the various departments in the brain are connected, too? I began to wonder: what if an individual’s body provides a graphic representation of the inner workings of the brain?”

MS Comment: There are so many background insights in this book relating to “basic operating principles” and basic common sense that sensory integration, vestibular remediation and somatosensory become actually exciting to study. A more profound model of human cognition than you would ever expect upon initial reflection.