As we have discussed in class, the brain is continuously evolving and creating new connections between neurons. These connections make everyday life possible. If humans, or animals in general, were incapable of creating outputs without inputs, they would not be able to creatively solve problems and adapt to new environments. Clearly, this is not the case given that modern homo sapiens have survived approximately 60,000 years of life on Earth (ScienceDaily, 2004). Thus, it is a fact that human brains have evolved to enable neural plasticity, or the ability to reorganize neuronal structures and create new connections between neurons. The question remains as to how the plasticity of the brain is maintained. How is it that neurons can create these new connections?

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Colette Young                                                                                                                   6 April 2010

                                                                                                                        Rama Kirloskar

“From the very start, the brain’s capacity for making new connections shows itself… as regions originally designed for other functions – particularly vision, motor, and multiple aspects of language – learn to interact with increasing speed. By the time a child is seven or eight, the beginning decoding brain illustrates both how much the young brain accomplishes and how far we have evolved… These three major distribution regions will be the foundation across all phases of reading for basic decoding, even though an increasing fluency… adds an interesting caveat to the unfolding portrait of the reading brain.” (1)

-Maryanne Wolf