When we are born, our brain does not know where it will live or what conditions there will be. He also does not know the dangers that he will have to face, if he is going to be born in a tropical or polar climate, or if his family will have a high socio-economic level … To adapt to this changing and unpredictable environment, the human being It has the so-called plastic brain processes.
In addition, when the functional integrity of our brain is compromised due to a brain injury, plastic properties emerge and are enhanced that allow survival and readjustment to the environment with the surviving functions of said brain damage. Thanks to these characteristics, the human being is possibly the greatest evolutionary success relative to adaptation to the environment.
Due to this plasticity and adaptability, it is the environmental conditions that will shape and structure the networks and the neuronal connectome. This neural organization that begins in childhood is genetically determined and environmentally directed (epigenetic). Only in this way, the human being ensures a greater probability of survival in an unknown environment.
A process that lasts a lifetime
But this process of organization and neural reorganization due to the continuous interaction of the human being with the environment is not a characteristic and exclusive of newborns, or children, but is maintained throughout life. This process of neuronal reorganization is called “brain plasticity” or neuroplasticity and it allows us to adapt to a dynamic, non-deterministic stimulating environment.
That is, if we lived in an always deterministic environment, where an event A always indicated B, neuroplasticity could have been an extinct or disappeared brain quality due to its inefficiency and high energy cost. Instead, we live in an indeterministic environment, where an event A sometimes indicates B, sometimes is C, and sometimes Z.
That is why only organisms that have a greater capacity to integrate new information and knowledge through the reorganization of previous schemes, and their individual assimilation at the biological level , are the ones that best adapt to the environment, and therefore , are those that have prevailed and will prevail during the phylogenetic development of the human species.
Umberto León Domínguez is Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Monterrey (Mexico) and José León Carrión is Professor of Neuropsychology at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Seville. Article written in collaboration with the UCC + i of the University of Seville and adapted by Victoria González.
