Recent models of psychopathology and psychotherapy highlight the importance of interpersonal factors. The current review offers a biological perspective on these interpersonal processes by examining inter-brain synchrony—the coupling of brain activity between people interacting with one another. High inter-brain synchrony is associated with better relationships in therapy and in daily life, while deficits in the ability to achieve inter-brain synchrony are associated with a variety of psychological and developmental disorders. The review suggests that therapy improves patients’ (...) ability to achieve such synchrony through inter-brain plasticity—a process by which recurring exposure to high inter-brain synchrony leads to lasting change in a person’s overall ability to synchronize. Therapeutic sessions provide repeated situations with high inter-brain synchrony. This can lead to a long-term increase in the ability to synchronize, first with the therapist, then generalized to other interpersonal relationships, ultimately leading to symptom reduction. The proposed inter-brain plasticity model offers a novel biological framework for understanding relational change in psychotherapy and its links to various forms of psychopathology and provides testable hypotheses for future research. Understanding this mechanism may help improve existing psychotherapy methods and develop new ones. (shrink)

The following two questions are addressed: to what extent and in what sense are concepts of consciousness subject to plasticity? And what is the relation between brain plasticity and phenomenal consciousness in particular? To answer these questions I discuss the extension thesis of the mind and also take advantage of a number of results from experimental brain science that demonstrate the brain's plasticity with respect to the processing of sensory information and associated qualitative expression. (...) Interpretations of these results in the hands of some researchers within the field of 'embodied cognition' are drawn upon. (shrink)

Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS, previously known as vegetative state) occurs after patients survive a severe brain injury. Patients suffering from UWS have lost awareness of themselves and of the external environment and do not retain any trace of their subjective experience. Current data demonstrate that neuronal functions subtending consciousness are not completely reset in UWS; however, they are reduced below the threshold required to experience consciousness. The critical factor that determines whether patients will recover consciousness is the distance of (...) their neuronal functions from this threshold level. Recovery of consciousness occurs through functional and/or structural changes in the brain, i.e., through neuronal plasticity. Although some of these changes may occur spontaneously, a growing body of evidence indicates that rehabilitative interventions can improve functional outcome by promoting adaptive functional and structural plasticity in the brain, especially if a comprehensive neurophysiological theory of consciousness is followed. In this review we will focus on the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in UWS and on the plastic changes operating on the recovery of consciousness. (shrink)

Single-sided deafness (SSD) or profound unilateral hearing loss obligates the only serviceable ear to capture all acoustic information. This loss of binaural function taxes cognitive resources for accurate listening performance, especially under adverse environments or challenging tasks. We hypothesized that adults with SSD would manifest both functional and structural brain plasticity compared to controls with normal binaural hearing. We evaluated functional alterations using magnetoencephalographic imaging (MEGI) of brain activation during performance of a moderately difficult auditory syllable sequence (...) reproduction task and assessed structural integrity using diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI). MEGI showed the SSD cohort to have increased induced oscillations in the theta band over the left superior temporal cortex and decreased induced gamma band oscillations over the frontal and parietal cortices between 175-475 ms following stimulus onset. DTI showed the SSD cohort to have extensive fractional anisotropy reduction in both auditory and non-auditory tracts and regions. Overlaying functional and structural changes revealed by the two imaging techniques demonstrated close registration of cortical areas and white matter tracts that expressed brain plasticity. Hence, complete loss of input from one ear in adulthood triggers both functional and structural alterations to dorsal temporal and frontal-parietal areas. (shrink)

This study investigated the differences in morphometry and functional plasticity characteristics of the brain after long-term training of different intensities. Results showed that an aerobic group demonstrated higher gray matter volume in the cerebellum and temporal lobe, while an anaerobic group demonstrated higher gray matter volume in the region of basal ganglia. In addition, the aerobic group also showed significantly higher fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation and degree centrality in the motor area of the frontal lobe and parietal (...) lobe, and the frontal gyrus, respectively. At the same time, the anaerobic group demonstrated higher fALFF and DC in the cerebellum posterior lobe. These findings may further prove that different brain activation modes respond to different intensities of physical activity and may help to reveal the neural mechanisms that can classify athletes from different intensity sports. (shrink)

This paper addresses what some view as a progressive and decades-long devaluing of the liberal arts in our educational institutions and society at large. It draws attention to symptoms of this trend and possible contributing factors, identifies benefits commonly attributed to the liberal arts, and then shows how insights from recent research on neuroplasticity provide good reason to believe that a traditional liberal education has positive effects on a person's brain. The paper supports the thesis that well-designed liberal arts (...) courses can literally transform students' minds and lives as a result of unique and synergistic brain processes activated and strengthened by the leaming experiences such courses provide. It finishes with recommendations to help reinvigorate and promote the value of liberal education. (shrink)

Sleep has long been a topic of fascination for artists and scientists. Why do we sleep? What function does sleep serve? Why do we dream? What significance can we attach to our dreams? We spend so much of our lives sleeping, yet its precise function is unclear, in spite of our increasing understanding of the processes generating and maintaining sleep. We now know that sleep can be accompanied by periods of intense cerebral activity, yet only recently has experimental data started (...) to provide us with some insights into the type of processing taking place in the brain as we sleep. There is now strong evidence that sleep plays a crucial role in learning and in the consolidation of memories. Once the preserve of psychoanalysts, 'dreaming' is now a topic of increasing interest amongst scientists. With research into sleep growing, this volume is both timely and valuable in presenting a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. It brings together a team of international scientists researching sleep in both human and animal subjects. Aimed at researchers within the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, this book will be an important first step in developing a full scientific understanding of the most intriguing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Consciousness is known to be limited in processing capacity and often described in terms of a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. In this paper, we discuss a purely temporal pattern code, functionally decoupled from spatial signals, for conscious state generation in the brain. Arguments in favour of such a code include Dehaene et al.’s long-distance reverberation postulate, Ramachandran’s remapping hypothesis, evidence for a temporal coherence index and coincidence detectors, and Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory. A time-bin resonance (...) model is developed, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation across large distances in highly plastic neural circuits. The temporal signatures are delivered by neural activity patterns which, beyond a certain statistical threshold, activate, maintain, and terminate a conscious brain state like a bar code would activate, maintain, or inactivate the electronic locks of a safe. Such temporal resonance would reflect a higher level of neural processing, one that is independent from sensorial or perceptual brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Contrary to assumptions that changes in brain networks are possible only during crucial periods of development, research in the past decade has supported the idea of a permanently plastic brain. Novel experience, altered afferent input due to environmental changes and learning new skills are now recognized as modulators of brain function and underlying neuroanatomic circuitry. Given findings in experiments with animals and the recent discovery of increases in gray and white matter in the adult human brain (...) as a result of learning, the old concept of cognitive reserve, that is the ability to reinforce brain volume in crucial areas and thus provide a greater threshold for age-dependent deficits, has been reinforced. The challenge we face is to unravel the exact nature of the dynamic structural alterations and, ultimately, to be able to use this knowledge for disease management. Understanding normative changes in brain structure that occur as a result of environmental changes and demands is pivotal to understanding the characteristic ability of the brain to adapt. (shrink)

Many researchers consider language to be definitionally unique to humans. However, increasing evidence suggests that language emerged via a series of adaptations to neural systems supporting earlier capacities for visuomotor integration and manual action. This paper reviews comparative neuroscience evidence for the evolutionary progression of these adaptations. An outstanding question is how to mechanistically explain the emergence of new capacities from pre-existing circuitry. One possibility is that human brains may have undergone selection for greater plasticity, reducing the extent to (...) which brain organization is hard-wired and increasing the extent to which it is shaped by socially transmitted, learned behaviors. Mutations that made these new abilities easier or faster to learn would have undergone positive selection, and over time, the neural changes once associated with individual neural plasticity would tend to become heritable, innate, and fixed. Clearly, though, language is not entirely “innate;” it does not emerge without the requisite environmental input and experience. Thus, a mechanistic explanation for the evolution of language must address the inherent trade-off between the evolutionary pressure for underlying neural systems to be flexible and sensitive to environmental input vs. the tendency over time for continually adaptive behaviors to become reliably expressed in an early-emerging, canalized, less flexible manner. (shrink)

Neuromodulatory effects of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) have been extensively studied in chronic pain. A hypothetic mechanism of action would be to prevent or revert the ongoing maladaptive plasticity within the pain matrix. In this review, the authors discuss the mechanisms underlying the development of an abnormal plasticity in patients with chronic pain and the putative mechanisms of NIBS in modulating synaptic plasticity in neuropathic pain conditions.

Languages emerge in response to the negotiation of shared meaning in social groups, where transparency of grammar is necessitated by demands of communication with relative strangers needing to consult on a wide range of topics (Ragir 2002). This communal exchange is automated and stabilized through activity-dependent fine-tuning of information-specific neural connections during postnatal growth and social development.

The study of controversies is an important methodological tool for understanding key aspects of scientific activity that are invisible from within the science itself. Following Sarah Whatmore, we argue that controversies are a force field within which there is a redistribution of expertise. As an application of the basic principles of ANT, the mapping of controversies lacks the disadvantages of constructivist and epistemological approaches to science. While preserving the validity of scientific facts, it could demonstrate the practice of finding allies (...) and creating new associations in the process of creating science. The analysis of controversies shows that a key feature of neuroscience today is a theoretical "consensus". The most important principle of this "consensus" is the idea of neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to be changed as a result of new experiences. The use of mapping methods allows us to show that this agreement hides a complex of controversies that touch on the problem of brain plasticity and theoretical models of behaviors. An attempt to explore these controversies reveals various strategies for finding allies within opposing research programs. These competing trends were divided into two groups: proponents of "universal" plasticity, which presupposes general laws for different structural levels of brain organization, and proponents of multiple plasticity. One of the most important strategies for expanding networks used by participants in the study is to reconstruct the history of their own object, as well as to attract non-specialists to obtain the necessary data for research. (shrink)

and apply it to various examples of neural plasticity in which input is rerouted intermodally or intramodally to nonstandard cortical targets. In some cases but not others, cortical activity ‘defers’ to the nonstandard sources of input. We ask why, consider some possible explanations, and propose a dynamic sensorimotor hypothesis. We believe that this distinction is important and worthy of further study, both philosophical and empirical, whether or not our hypothesis turns out to be correct. In particular, the question of (...) how the distinction should be explained is linked to explanatory gap issues for consciousness. Comparative and absolute explanatory gaps should be distinguished: why does neural activity in a particular area of cortex have this qualitative expression rather than that, and why does it have any qualitative expression at all? We use the dominance/deference distinction to address the comparative gaps, both intermodal and intramodal. We do so not by inward scrutiny but rather by expanding our gaze to include relations between brain, body and environment. (shrink)

Numerous studies have investigated the neuro-cognitive mechanism of learning words in isolation or in semantic contexts recently. However, emotion as an important influencing factor on novel word learning has not been fully considered in the previous studies and how emotion affect word learning and the underlying neural mechanism have not been systematically investigated. 16 participants were trained to learn novel concrete or abstract words under negative, neutral and positive contextual emotions in continuous three days, and fufilled the testing tasks in (...) day1 and day3 during fMRI scanning. We compared the brain activations in day1 and day3 aming to investigate the role of contextual emotions in learning different types of words and the corresponding neural plasticity changes. Behaviorally, the performance for the words learned in negative context was lower than the neutral and positive contexts, which indicated that the contextual emotions had significant impact on novel word learning. Correspondingly, the functional plasticity changes of the right angular (AG), bilateral insula and anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) induced by word learning were modulated by the contextual emotions. And the insula also was sensitive to the concreteness of the learned words. More importantly, the functional plasticity changes of left inferior frontal gyrus(L IFG) and left fusiform(L FG) were interactively influenced by the contextual emotions and words’ concreteness, suggesting that the contextual emotional information had a discriminable effect on different types of words in the neural mechanism level. These results demonstrate that the emotional information in contexts is inevitable for word learning, and the role of contextual emotions in brain plasticity for learning was discussed. (shrink)

The acquisition and evolution of speech production, discourse and communication can be negatively impacted by brain malformations. We describe, for the first time, a case of developmental dynamic dysphasia (DDD) in a right-handed adolescent boy (subject D) with cortical malformations involving language-eloquent regions (inferior frontal gyrus) in both the left and the right hemispheres. Language evaluation revealed a markedly reduced verbal output affecting phonemic and semantic fluency, phrase and sentence generation and verbal communication in everyday life. Auditory comprehension, repetition, (...) naming, reading and spelling were relatively preserved, but executive function was impaired. Multimodal neuroimaging showed a malformed cerebral cortex with atypical configuration and placement of white matter tracts bilaterally and abnormal callosal fibers. Dichotic listening showed right hemisphere dominance for language and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) additionally revealed dissociated hemispheric language representation with right frontal activation for phonology and bilateral dominance for semantic processing. Moreover, subject D also had congenital mirror movements (CMM), defined as involuntary movements of one side of the body that mirror intentional movements of the other side. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI during voluntary unimanual (left and right) hand movements showed bilateral motor cortex recruitment and tractography revealed a lack of decussation of bilateral corticospinal tracts. Genetic testing aimed to detect mutations that disrupt the development of commissural tracts correlating with CMM (e.g., Germline DCC mutations) was negative. Overall, our findings suggest that DDD in subject D resulted from the underdevelopment of the left inferior frontal gyrus with limited capacity for plastic reorganization by its homologous counterpart in the right hemisphere. Corpus callosum anomalies probably contributed to hinder interhemispheric connectivity necessary to compensate language and communication deficits after left frontal involvement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Plastic Turn by Ghosh, RanjanMaria MargaroniGhosh, Ranjan. The Plastic Turn. Cornell University Press, 2022. 224pp.In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (2005; 2010), Catherine Malabou argues that “the concept of plasticity is becoming both the dominant formal motif of interpretation and the most productive exegetical and heuristic tool of our time,” supplanting older theoretical paradigms such as “writing” and “the trace” (57). (...) Almost twenty years later, the truth of this statement is certainly confirmed not only by Malabou’s own developing elaboration of this concept and the growing body of works inspired by her creative adaptation of neurological theory in the realm of philosophy, but also by the proliferation of studies that seek to reflect on the ecological, anthropological, ethical, or political consequences of what has been termed the “Plasticene.”1 There is no doubt, then, that we are witnessing yet another “turn” in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the plastic turn coming to displace or supplement a host of currently competing theoretical tendencies: i.e., the material turn, the affective turn, the cognitive turn, and the mimetic turn, among others.2Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn is the first in a trilogy intended to theorize the aims, scope and effects of a “plastic Humanities.”3 Interestingly, Ghosh does not locate the “turn” in the 1990s when plastic “gained widespread public acceptance” (Mah 31) and when (with the development of the neurosciences) brain plasticity was increasingly adopted as “the most effective sensor of energy and meaning” of our contemporary era (Malabou, Plasticity 31-32). Instead, he goes back to the turn of the twentieth century when plastic as a new material and plasticity as a scheme of thought were still in the realm of potentiality, triggering, countering, and reshaping many of our political, cultural, and aesthetic modern imaginaries.Much has been written about the promise of plastic as a “magical” substance, capable of sublimating matter into what Roland Barthes describes as the trace of a metamorphic movement that produces an abundance of forms out of the singularity of its origin (104-105). In “The Material Consciousness of Plastics,” Russell Gagg notes that “in the early part of the twentieth century, plastics were seen as leading a new utopian vision for economic growth after the depression of the pre-war and austerity of the post-war years” (32). In the interwar period, plastics were [End Page 149] promoted for their democratic, egalitarian potential in making “designed consumer goods […] commercially viable,” thus introducing an aesthetics of the popular and the banal (Gagg 44-45; Ghosh 9, 20). One of the many strengths of Ghosh’s book is that it takes inspiration not merely from plastic as the stuff of fantasy but also from the very materiality of plastic, namely, its polymeric structure, malleability of form, sensitivity to the change of temperature, crystalline-amorphous texture, diverse modes of esterification, and resistance to biodegradability. In his first chapter, Ghosh acknowledges the influence of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table which, as he argues, bring “the chemical metaphor to bear on human relationships” (20). He points to the development of a body of contemporary works that elaborate a “chemo-poetics,” aiming to “connect life and its undulations with molecular formations” (21).4 In subsequent chapters, the author succeeds in re-molding the chemical metaphor exploited in these works into a full-blown “material-aesthetic” that enables him to produce new readings of the forces behind literary modernism; the possibilities, limits, and stakes of world literature; the emergence of uncanny forms of plastic nature and art; and the distinct affective modalities caused by our petro-modernity.In analyzing side-by-side the diverse histories of, on the one hand, plastic as an increasingly disgraced material and, on the other hand, our literary, aesthetic, and critical production from the early 20th century to the present, Ghosh is dependent on an analogical process that permits him to think across multiple disciplines and subjects, connecting terms, ideas, and practices that resonate but remain asymmetrical (1). As he emphasizes, it is the “asymmetrically analogous (metaphors)” that “deepens the framework of my arguments” (3). Indeed... (shrink)

This article brings Catherine Malabou's explorations of bodily mutation and metamorphosis at the intersections of philosophy and biomedical science into contact with film. In particular, it explores dialogues between Malabou's work on biomedical understandings of bodily plasticity and filmic representations of medical interventions in the body. This article specifically explores Malabou in relation to Katell Quillévéré's film Heal the Living (Réparer les vivants, 2016), an adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal's novel The Heart (Réparer les vivants, 2014). The film tells (...) the story of Simon Limbres, who is taken to a hospital following a road accent and pronounced brain dead. The film then explores how Simon undergoes organ donation, following his organs on their journey to other bodies in need. I argue that Heal the Living allows us to challenge and extend Malabou's central thinking of (neuro)plasticity, precisely by emphasising the plasticity of the body beyond and in the wake of the brain. Further, the film's emphasis on transplantation allows for an exploration of interpersonal plasticity, developing an ethics of transplanted plasticity in testing and extending conceptions of otherness and alterity central to Malabou's thinking. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any (...) self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture. (shrink)

Probably colour is the best worked-out example of allegedly neurophysiologically innate response categories determining percepts and percepts determining concepts, and hence biology fixing the basic categories implicit in the use of language. In this paper I argue against this view and I take C. L. Hardin's Color for Philosophers [1988] as my main target. I start by undermining the view that four unique hues stand apart from all other colour shades (Section 2) and the confidence that the solar spectrum is (...) naturally divided into four categories (Section 3). For such categories to be truly universal, they have to be true for all peoples and in Section 4 I show that Berlin and Kay's [1969] widely quoted theory of basic colour categories is not sufficiently supported to lend it any credibility.Having disposed of the view that inspection of language or ‘pure’ perception unveils the universal colour categories. I turn to neurophysiological and psychophysical theories of colour vision to see whether they provide a more solid basis for deciding what the innate response categories are. In Section 5 I show that Hardin's account of the opponent-process theory neither supports his view that ‘colour-coding’takes place early in the visual neural pathway, nor his view that knowledge of colour vision science will help us solve many philosophical mysteries about colour.In Section 6 I give a more detailed review of what is known today about the neurophysiology of colour vision and I show that there's nothing in the brain which could be called a colour module, let alone a module with homunculi for particular basic colour categories. In Section 7 I show that psychophysical models do not support such rigid constraints on category formation either. Hence (Section 8), at least in the case of colour, current science supports a plasticity in the formation of categories that goes far beyond the requirements of those naturalistic philosophers who would like to ground primitive concepts in biology. (shrink)

Neural plasticity has been invoked as a powerful argument against nativism. However, there is a line of argument, which is well exemplified by Pinker and more recently by Laurence and Margolis The conceptual mind: new directions in the study of concepts, MIT, Cambridge, 2015) with respect to concept nativism, according to which even extreme cases of plasticity show important innate constraints, so that one should rather speak of “constrained plasticity”. According to this view, cortical areas are not (...) really equipotential, they perform instead different kinds of computation, follow essentially different learning rules, or have a fixed internal structure acting as a filter for specific categories of inputs. We intend to analyze this argument, in the light of a review of current neuroscientific literature on plasticity. Our conclusion is that Laurence and Margolis are right in their appeal to innate constraints on connectivity—a thesis that is nowadays welcome to both nativists and non-nativists —but there is little support for their claim of further innate differentiation between and within cortical areas. As we will show, there is instead strong evidence that the cortex is characterized by the indefinite repetition of substantially identical computational units, giving rise in any of its portions to Hebbian, input-dependent plasticity. Although this is entirely compatible with the existence of innate constraints on the brain’s connectivity, the cerebral cortex architecture based on a multiplicity of maps correlating with one another has important computational consequences, a point that has been underestimated by traditional connectionist approaches. (shrink)

The paper aims at proposing an extended notion of epigenesis acknowledging an actual causal import to the phenotypic dimension for the evolutionary diversification of life forms. “Introductory remarks” section offers introductory remarks on the issue of epigenesis contrasting it with ancient and modern preformationist views. In “Transmutation of forms: phenotypic variation, diversification, and complexification” section we propose to intend epigenesis as a process of phenotypic formation and diversification dependent on environmental influences, independent of changes in the genomic nucleotide sequence, and (...) occurring during the whole life span. Then, “Evolvability and phenotypic evolution” section focuses on phenotypic plasticity and offers an overview of basic properties that allows biological systems to be evolvable—i.e. to have the potentiality of producing phenotypic variation. Successively, the emphasis is put on environmentally-induced modifications in the regulation of gene expression giving rise to phenotypic variation and diversification. After some brief considerations on the debated issue of epigenetic inheritance, the issue of culture is considered. The key point is that, in the case of humans and of the evolutionary history of the genus Homo at least, the environment is also, importantly, the cultural environment. Thus, “Bio-cultural feedback” section argues that a bio-cultural feedback should be acknowledged in the “epigenic” processes leading to phenotypic diversification and innovation in Homo evolution. Finally, “Brain plasticity and cultural neural reuse” section introduces the notion of “cultural neural reuse”, which refers to phenotypic/neural modifications induced by specific features of the cultural environment that are effective in human cultural evolution without involving genetic changes. Therefore, cultural neural reuse may be regarded as a key instance of the bio-cultural feedback and ultimately of the extended notion of epigenesis proposed in this work. (shrink)