LEARNING EXPERIENCE AND

NEUROPLASTICITY – A SHIFTING PARADIGM

Lageen khan
Student of psychological studies, semester 2
Introduction to information and computer technology
Ma’am Aiman Kamal
University of Swat
Women’s campus
Dated: 1st august, 2024
ABSTRACT.
This paper is a summary of significant findings from the last

decades concerning the brain’s plasticity and its links and relevance for the

learning processes. Until two decades ago, there were few things known about

neuroplasticity. Scientists referred to neuroplasticity referring to the maturing

brain during childhood. Also they recognized it when compensating altered

functions in brain damage cases, through maximizing the functionality of

intact brain areas and improving the functional reorganization of the brain. The

research of the last decades indicates that neuroplasticity is present all through

life, whenever we are learning or memorizing something new. Neuroplasticity

is considered to be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth

century.

A summary of the significant findings from the last decades

concerning the brain’s plasticity and its links and relevance for the learning

processes.

KEYWORDS:

learning, neuroplasticity, cognition, development.

The State of the Art

Neuroplasticity, cortical plasticity or cortical re-mapping refer to

the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways according to

new experiences. It is the capacity to change through learning experiences,

and learning means acquiring new knowledge and new skills,

benefiting from instructions or experience. For the phenomena of

learning, memorizing, acquiring new knowledge and skills correspond

to functional changes in the brain.

PhD, Associate Professor at the “Titu Maiorescu” University Bucharest.

It shows some commonalities with a study I published on a similar topic Joja, O. (2008),

‘Learning and Creativity: Recent Research Developments in Neurosciences’. Extended

paper for the volume of the Conference ‘Teaching and Education’ at the Titu Maiorescu

University Bucharest.

Research developments confirmed that neuroplasticity is present all through our lives, whenever we are
learning or memorizing something new. Empirical data have been overthrowing the centuries-old notion
that the human brain would be immutable. Neuroplasticity has been considered as one of the most
extraordinary discoveries of the 20th century3.

The idea o neuroplasticity has been launched in 1890 by William James, in his The Principles of
Psychology, but it has been ignored for a long time. The consensus among neuroscientists was that brain
structure is relatively immutable after the critical period of the early childhood. This belief has been
challenged by findings revealing that many areas of the brain, and not only one (the hippocampus), as
was erroneously thought, remain plastic even in adulthood4.

The Canadian psychologist Donald Olding Hebb (1904–1985) has been considered as the father of
neuropsychology, due to his study The Organization of Behaviour5. Hebb’s main topics have been the
neural networks and the learning processes. He tried to understand and explain the brain’s function and
its relationship to the mind, challenging through evidence-based data the old mind and body dualism,
exploring the biological function of the brain correlated to behavior. Hebb’s well known thesis has been
recalled by recent science and is still often quoted as Hebb’s postulate: “Neurons that fire together wire
together”, a thesis which explains the adaptation of neurons during the learning process. Hebb managed
to describe the basic mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, wherein an increase in synaptic efficacy arises
from presynaptic neuron’s repeated and persistent stimulation of the postsynaptic cell. The theory
assumes that cell assemblies constitute the foundation of memory “engrams” and therein learning will
be best described as: When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or
persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both
cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased6. Just two decades ago, scientists
still

believed that the ability of neuroplasticity would only occur under distinct conditions, i.e. at the
beginning of life, when the immature brain organizes itself; in case of brain injury, to compensate for
lost functions or maximize remaining functions and through adulthood, whenever something new is
learned and memorized7.

In the year 2000, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel shared the Nobel price for their
contribution in studying the signal transduction in the nervous system. The three Nobel Laureats in
Physiology and Medicine have made pioneering discoveries concerning one type of signal transduction
between nerve cells, referred to as slow synaptic transmission. These discoveries have been crucial for
an understanding of the normal function of the brain and how disturbances in this signal transduction
can give rise to neurological and psychiatric diseases8. With the nervous system of a sea slug „as (an)
experimental model, he (Eric Kandel) has demonstrated how changes of synaptic function are central for
learning and memory. Protein phosphorylation in synapses plays an important role for the generation of
a form of short term memory. For the development of a long term memory a change in protein
synthesis is also required, which can lead to alterations in shape and function of the synapse”9.
Neuroimaging research of the past decades – marked by the 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate in neurosciences
Eric Kandel10 – confirmed the human brain’s power of neuroplasticity and its ability to change its
structure and function in response to experience. Every new experience demands an effort of
adaptation, inducing the process of integrating new information, i.e. a the learning process. Learning, as
well as thinking and acting, may change both the brain’s functional and physical anatomy.
Neuroplasticity is part of several important functions, including learning, memory, and response to
novelty.

We know from animal (rodent) studies, initiated during the 1960’s, that rodents raised in an enriched
environment have a larger cortex, more cellular connections, and are developing new brain cells
(neurogenesis) in the hippocampus12. Starting with the 1990’s, such data have been replicated on
humans13. Still, the mechanisms by which new neurons are generated and could contribute to brain
repair are poorly understood14.

A series of studies indicated for rodents, non-human primates and humans that enriched
environments15 may produce not only a host of structural and functional changes in the brain16, but
also a significant increase in the hippocampal neurogenesis17. It appears that, the hippocampal
neurogenesis in particular may play a role in the neuroadaptation associated with pathologies, such as
cognitive disorders and depression18. „Increased cell birth is associated with learning, memory,
exercise, and antidepressant treatment, and decreased rates of cell proliferation are seen in response to
stress and during aging. In addition, drugs, as well as hormones and growth factors, can regulate the
rate of cell proliferation”.

Enriched environment
The factors underlying the positive actions of an enriched environment include a combination of social
interactions, learning and memory, as well as behavioral activity (van Praag et al., 200020).

The standard definition of an enriched environment is “a combination of complex inanimate and social
stimulation”21. “This definition implies that the relevance of single contributing factors can not be easily
isolated, but there are good reasons to assume that it is the interaction of factors that is an essential
element of an enriched environment, not any single element that is hidden in the complexity.

Further data on neuroplasticity

A much cited book published by Norman Doidge in 200726, describes numerous examples of functional
shifts in brain, which are due to neuroplasticity. Plasticity phenomena have been registered at bilinguals,
as indicated by Mechelli et al.27 This group of researchers showed that: “earning a second language
increased the density of grey matter (cortex) in the left inferior parietal cortex and, the degree of
structural reorganization appeared to be modulated by the proficiency attained and the age at the
acquisition of the language. This relation between the grey-matter density and the language
performance may represent a general principle of brain organization”, concluded Mechelli et al. in their
study.

Learning Processes in Developmental Psychology

One of the definitions of neuroplasticity is that of the selective organization of connections between
neurons in our brains, meaning that when people repeatedly practice an activity or repeatedly access
certain information of the memory, the neural networks are shaping themselves according to that very
pattern of activity or memory. Throughout this process, electrochemical pathways are reinforced and
those groups of neurons which are firing together, are also wiring together, as Hebb formulated it.

When people stop practicing certain activities or stop reactivating certain information, the brain will
eventually eliminate, or prune the connections which formed the corresponding pathways.

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) considered, on behalf of long-termed and complex observations and
experiments, that infants have no innate knowledge, and neither a sense of the “object permanence”31,
beyond their actual senses. Piaget believed, just as many neuroscientists do today, that infants are
gradually assembling knowledge from experience. This constructivist approach has much influenced the
psychology of the last century.

Starting in the mid–1980’s, a series of experiments and observations have been undertaken, in which
infants were shown physical events that seemed to violate basic concepts as gravity, solidity and
contiguity. The knowledge of the physical world and a rudimentary programming for mathematics and
language, and constructivists, sustaining an all over learning hypothesis, e.g. viewing the cognitive
development as a progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures.

Researchers around Sylvain Sirois from the University of Manchester (UK) repeated some of the
experiments, also carefully registering infants’ emotions and motor reactions. With this
neoconstructivist approach, they proposed a unifying framework for understanding the cognitive
development. The guiding principle was what they called context dependence, within and between
levels of organization of the human’s mind throughout its development. They proposed three
mechanisms guiding “the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy,
which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization”32.

A series of brain-imaging studies showed that the brain has a „visual buffer” that continues to represent
objects after they have been removed. So, when infants encounter novel or an unexpected event and
“there is a mismatch between the older buffer and the new information they are getting at that
moment, they have to adapt the old structures to the new information. That means that they have to
resolve that mismatch by clearing (resetting) the buffer”33. Sirois et al. (2007) are concluding that
learning essentially means a laborious business of resolving mismatches34.se experiments parted
develop Learning, the self and consciousness

Joseph LeDoux is a well-known researcher and a professor for Neural Science at the New York
University. In his book Synaptic Self. How Our Brain Becomes Who We Are35 he is explaining the
synaptic basis of the brain and the complicated relationship between genes and environment. LeDoux
asks how we should conceive this ental psychologists.

(pre-existing) basis, if the development of synapses is an epigenetic process. There seems to be no good
reason for not admitting that the function of some networks would be more or less settled through
inheritance and this appears to be true especially in the case of predispositions which allow the
integration of certain kinds of information.

LeDoux describes learning as a timeless process, running through all our lives. It appears as being
exaggerated to suppose that certain learning processes have to be undertaken at a precise early age
and, if missed, the brain would not be able to acquire later on that specific information. In that context,
LeDoux analyses data which indicate that the infants’ brain is changing every time he is learning
something new and that this very change will further help him to acquire new information36. The early
years are most important not because there would be no chance for recuperating, but because the
information and schema assimilated during that time are basic for further learning.

For LeDoux there is a particular relationship between enduring learning and the development of the self.
The self becomes a self for most of its part throughout the process of re-shaping old memories into new
ones. Accordingly, learning means producing (new) memories, a process that depends upon things that
we have learned before37. Thus, the self appears to be partly a product of memory and it is kept
(maintained) throughout memory, implying explicit, as well as implicit forms of memory.

Another interesting view upon learning linked to neuroplasticity is that of Antonio Damasio, the director
of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Damasio pertains to the
oddness of some philosopher’s believe that solving the problem of consciousness would be beyond the
reach of human intelligence38. He considers such a believe as fitting the sensible intuition about our
mind being something different, separable from the brain. But, says Damasio, the fact that the intuition
is sensible does not make this argument being right. In his view, the gene networks organize themselves
producing complex organisms and the brains of these

organisms enable what we call behavior and their further evolution, unto growing their complexity.

Therein, the brain appears to be working out a sort of sensory and motor maps, which are representing
the environments the brain interacts with. Inside such interactions, our mind’s maps are responding to
and are being modified by the environment. He explains how the networks of synapses are being wired
to reflect a world, implying the additional trait of each person’s specific construction39.

Behavior, feelings, and emotions are colored by genes. But they are also influenced and modeled by the
environment, perhaps primarily in the context of interpersonal relationships. One suggestion comes
from the social neglect data (missing relationships), which may have as consequence the loss of neurons
and the deconstruction of synapses, the latter, in turn, producing emotional disturbances. And the
cognitive development of humans appear to depend enormously upon the emotional stability which
enhances the capacity for learning through mechanisms such as curiosity and motivation.

Conclusions
In summary, changes in the messages the brain receives may massively contribute to the brain’s
development, e.g. to its cognitive development. Last decades’ research has indicated that they may also
alter the structure of the brain and its functioning. The neuroimaging data have been tremendously
challenging our knowledge in this area during the last decades. The developmental approach
reconsidering constructivism for understanding the infant’s cognitive development has been partly
linked with neuroimaging data. The new ways of conceptualizing psychological processes, and especially
learning, have changed our view upon the architecture and the functioning of the human mind. Some of
the relevant data are summarized in this paper.