Removing brakes on adult brain plasticity: from molecular to behavioral interventions

By Daphne Bavelier, Dennis M. Levi, Roger Li, Y. Dan, Takao K. Hensch. 2010

580 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Adult brain plasticity, although possible, remains more restricted in scope than during development. Here, we address conditions under which circuit rewiring may be facilitated in the mature brain. At a cellular and molecular level, adult plasticity is actively limited. Some of these “brakes” are structural, such as perineuronal nets or myelin, which inhibit neurite outgrowth. Others are functional, acting directly upon excitatory-inhibitory balance within local circuits. Plasticity in adulthood can be induced either by lifting these brakes through invasive interventions or by exploiting endogenous permissive factors, such as neuromodulators. Using the amblyopic visual system as a model, we discuss genetic, pharmacological, and environmental removal of brakes to enable recovery of vision in adult rodents. Although these mechanisms remain largely uncharted in the human, we consider how they may provide a biological foundation for the remarkable increase in plasticity after action video game play by amblyopic subjects.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Neural plasticity across the lifespan (2016, background): “The factors that govern the opening and closing of critical windows are partially understood (see Levelt and Hübener16 or Bavelier et al.17 for review).”
Modeling the dynamic interaction of Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity. (2014, background): “A variety of mechanisms not considered here may contribute to closing the critical period for MD-induced ODP (reviewed in Bavelier et al., 2010; Espinosa and Stryker, 2012).”
Extrasynaptic GABAA receptors: Their function in the CNS and implications for disease (2012, background): “The adult brain possesses a remarkable structural and functional plasticity, but some barriers may impede its plasticity once a developmental window is closed (Bavelier et al., 2010).”
Learning, attentional control and action video games (2012, background): “But although it is unarguably the case that the malleability of the brain declines with age, recent research shows that, given appropriate training, the adult brain has the capacity for far more substantial plasticity than previously believed [11,15].”
Brain on stress: How the social environment gets under the skin (2012, background): “More targeted interventions for emotional and cognitive dysfunction may arise from fundamental studies of such developmental processes as the reversal of amblyopia and other conditions by releasing the brakes that retard structural and functional plasticity (97).”
Origins of task-specific sensory-independent organization in the visual and auditory brain: neuroscience evidence, open questions and clinical implications. (2015, unknown): “Intriguingly, recent evidence with animals indicate that chemical interventions can release molecular ‘breaks’ of plasticity (involving the balance between inhibition and excitation) and trigger the reopening of modality-specific critical/sensitive periods, thus ultimately resetting juvenile brain p”
Adolescent neurodevelopment. (2013, background): “At maturity, the balance is shifted toward greater stability of neural circuits, although the capacity for plasticity is still present in restricted form (73).”
Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles (2015, methodology): “…in adulthood via molecular manipulations which reopen critical-period development opportunities based on the principles naturally occurring in critical periods and following brain injury (e.g. excitatoryinhibitory balance) (Bavelier et al., 2010; Kuhlman et al., 2013; Nahmani and Turrigiano, 2014).”
Reading with sounds: sensory substitution selectively activates the visual word form area in the blind. (2012, background): “…studies show that combined treatment that includes visual training (along with patching of the nonamblyopic eye) can trigger adult plasticity and greatly improve the perceptual outcome, thus reopening the sensitive period for plasticity (Maurer and Hensch, 2012; see also Bavelier et al., 2010).”
Adolescence as a neurobiological critical period for the development of higher-order cognition (2018, unknown): “Myelin formation increases near the end of CPs and myelin-related inhibitory proteins, MAG (myelin associated glycoprotein) and NogoA (neurite outgrowth inhibitor), bind to the myelin related Nogo receptor preventing future branching of neural circuits (Bavelier et al., 2010; McGee et al., 2005).”