How Neuroplasticity Affects the Brain
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White and gold or blue and black? Under normal circumstances, "light enters the eye through the lens---different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image" (Rogers, 2015). However, with this image our brain can't figure out what it is seeing because the camera does not have chromatic adaptation like the brain does. Chromatic adaptation is where under different lights our brain can still tell that a banana is yellow despite the brightness or darkness of the environment. This is a great example of neuroplasticity which is, the ability of the brain to modify its neural connections to adapt to challenges in the environment (BrainFacts/SfN, 2012). Within this example the brain has modified how it perceives color based on the time of day or light allowed.
Another example that shows neuroplasticity is Wanda Diaz Merced. She is an astronomer who lost her eyesight, but figured out a way to hear the stars. She learned how to put a graph of a gamma ray burst to sound. Using pitch, Wanda could listen for any sounds that were out of the normal range just like the researchers who used their vision to look at the charts. "When I hear someone talking, and I guess most blind people and people that are not visually oriented, they can tell if the person is sad or if something has happened to that person, if the person is angry, et cetera. It's the same thing with this sound. And you feel that something is being communicated to you, that you're just perceiving it, and it makes you feel - it makes me feel good (NPR/TED Staff, 2017)." Wanda's environment had changed due to her vision loss and her brain altered her neural connections in her brain to heighten her hearing.
BrainFacts/SfN. (2012, April 1). Plasticity. BrainFacts.org. Retrieved April 28, 2023, from https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/brain-development/2012/plasticity
NPR/TED Staff. (2017, January 19). How can we hear the stars? NPR. Retrieved April 28, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/2017/01/20/510612425/how-can-we-hear-the-stars
Rogers, A. (2015, February 27). The science of why no one agrees on the color of this dress. Wired. Retrieved April 28, 2023, from https://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
