A limerick a day hopefully keeps the neurologist away

by

– Hat tip to Bar­bara Arrowsmith-Young

Mark Rosenzweig’s classic 1996 paper on neuroplasticity:

Psy­chobi­ol­o­gy of plas­tic­i­ty: effects of train­ing and expe­ri­ence on brain and behav­ior (Behav­iour­al Brain Research):

Abstract: Sup­port­ing Heb­b’s 1949 hypoth­e­sis of use-induced plas­tic­i­ty of the ner­vous sys­tem, our group found in the 1960s that train­ing or dif­fer­en­tial expe­ri­ence induced neu­ro­chem­i­cal changes in cere­bral cor­tex of the rat and region­al changes in weight of cor­tex. Fur­ther stud­ies revealed changes in cor­ti­cal thick­ness, size of synap­tic con­tacts, num­ber of den­drit­ic spines, and den­drit­ic branch­ing. Sim­i­lar effects were found whether rats were assigned to dif­fer­en­tial expe­ri­ence at wean­ing (25 days of age), as young adults (105 days) or as adults (285 days). Enriched ear­ly expe­ri­ence improved per­for­mance on sev­er­al tests of learn­ing. Cere­bral results of expe­ri­ence in an enriched envi­ron­ment are sim­i­lar to results of for­mal train­ing. Enriched expe­ri­ence and train­ing appear to evoke the same cas­cade of neu­ro­chem­i­cal events in caus­ing plas­tic changes in brain. Suf­fi­cient­ly rich expe­ri­ence may be nec­es­sary for full growth of species-spe­cif­ic brain char­ac­ter­is­tics and behav­ioral poten­tial. Clay­ton and Krebs found in 1994 that birds that nor­mal­ly store food have larg­er hip­pocampi than relat­ed species that do not store. This dif­fer­ence devel­ops only in birds giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to store and recov­er food. Research on use-induced plas­tic­i­ty is being applied to pro­mote child devel­op­ment, suc­cess­ful aging, and recov­ery from brain dam­age; it is also being applied to ben­e­fit ani­mals in lab­o­ra­to­ries, zoos and farms.

Limerick in Context: