PURPOSE This paper reviews 10 principles of experience-dependent neural plasticity and considerations in applying them to the damaged brain. METHOD Neuroscience research using a variety of models of learning, neurological disease, and trauma are reviewed from the perspective of basic neuroscientists but in a manner intended to be useful for the development of more effective clinical rehabilit...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by a gradual and hierarchical decline in cognition that is essentially connected with the functional properties of brain areas with the highest degree of plasticity. Corresponding brain regions are mostly affected by histological determinants of AD. Crucial pathways involved in maintaining the neural plasticity were also shown to be impaired in AD. Brai...

Neural circuits generally process information in a massively parallel way and exhibit a communication between the constituent units based on spikes, i.e. binary events, therefore differing fundamentally from many artificial information processing and learning systems. In such neural circuits, synaptic plasticity is widely considered to be the main biophysical correlate of learning. This thesis ...

On February 12th 1973, Bliss and Lomo submitted their findings on activity-dependent plasticity of glutamatergic synapses. After this groundbreaking discovery, long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD) gained center stage in the study of learning, memory, and experience-dependent refinement of neural circuits. While LTP and LTD are extensively studied and their relevance to brain functi...

An essential feature of the brain is its capacity to change. Neuroscientists use the term ‘plasticity’ to describe the malleability of neuronal connectivity and circuitry. How does plasticity work? A review of current data suggests that plasticity encompasses many distinct phenomena, some of which operate across most or all of the lifespan, and others that operate exclusively in early developme...

Experience shapes the central nervous system throughout life. Structural and functional plasticity confers a remarkable ability on the brain, allowing neural circuits to adequately adapt to dynamic environments. This process can require selective adjustment of many excitatory and inhibitory synapses in an organized manner, in such a way as to enhance representations of behaviorally important se...

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and related algorithms provide a model for explaining how sensory information is encoded in our brains. However, it remains unclear how neural network uses its biological plasticity to achieve this ICA-like processing: maximization of information transmission or minimization of redundancy. Here, we consider a neuron model proposed by Savin, Joshi, and Triesc...