Examples of Neuroplasticity

Ultimately, whether by regenerative medicine or bimodal stimulation (once they fine tune it better especially), neuroplasticity is what will be needed to reduce or eliminate tinnitus at that point.

There are lots of examples of this working conceptually; Mirror therapy for phantom limb, vestibular physical therapy, and @GlennS mentioned it for dyslexia in another thread.

There is even a ton evidence for cochlear implant use treating tinnitus.

I see a lot of pessimism about neuroplasticity somehow not working for tinnitus but I don't see a biological basis for this at all. That is a perspective rooted in fear in my opinion. I just don't see how neuroplasticity would work for everything but tinnitus. That is not how it works.

 

Unfortunately plasticity is the very thing that's responsible for our tinnitus. It's the sound of a brain trying to repair itself and failing.

Dyslexia, with proper screening, is almost always detected in children as opposed to adults. It's generally not something that you grow out of . You could always have been misdiagnosed, I guess?

 

Of course neuroplasticity is involved in tinnitus but i wanted to point to examples of "re-adjustment" as in the cochlear implant example.

 

Does this generally mean that any tinnitus treatments will be more effective the younger the sufferer is?

 

That's an interesting question and I'm not sure. While that's true with neuroplasticity in certain forebrain conditions (like stroke), I haven't seen anything that suggests that with phantom limb syndrome which would be a more apt comparison.

 

People hate the “neuroplasticity cure” because they equate it to habituation.

 

Of course you're right about that. I didn't read the original post. A cure will probably involve neuroplasticity. It's sometimes said that tinnitus centralises and spreads to other parts of the brain. I wonder if that's really a demonstrable fact and what it would mean for treatment.

 

So, in laymen's terms, regenerative medicine or bimodal stimulation are only half the picture? Following them, the brain needs to do 'its thing' to get back to square one?

 

They are not the same thing at all though. Neuroplasticity in this case means the brain readjusting to stimuli that's been more normalized not "getting used to" abnormal stimuli.

 

Yes but the brain doesn't need any additional treatment to do its thing, it will just respond to the normalized stimulus as it does in other examples.

 

I know this, but most people don’t, which is the problem.

 

Getting used to it IS neuroplasticity in a sense. Or call it a mental discipline or learned skill.

For some reason I am thinking of the dog being trained to fear cupcakes.



Or Alex being trained to retch over thoughts of violence in A Clockwork Orange (the moral there being that such training eventually wears off).

But this sort of thing is definitely a real phenomenon.

I think some of the demonizing that goes on over habituation fails to acknowledge that there's hardly any better alternatives right now. If you want to function as normally as possible you have to figure out a way to escape out of fight or flight and push awareness of tinnitus into the background. Call it what you will but it's the only thing any of us lean on, right?

 

Not really neuroplasticity per se, but I know when getting intensive jaw surgeries people can lose feeling/control in areas of their face for up to a year (sometimes more) and as the nerve heals they regain sensation/control in the effected areas bit by bit. As long as the brain is still equipped to handle the inputs, I think it will be able to “switch on”. The real curiosity will be with those who have had tinnitus for decades, I can’t think of an example that fits that timeline.

 

Here’s a pretty significant example of neuroplasticity: severe sleep apnoea affects the white matter in the brain interfering with mood and cognition heavily. In individuals with untreated OSA, it was found their brains recovered almost completely after a year of treatment.

Source

Your brain is alive and constantly changing.

 

Neuroplasticity is good for breaking hard addictions (drugs, excessive porn use, or reckless gambling) but it's not really far to apply it to people who suffer from physical health problems.

This is interesting, biologist who would one day want to treat neuropathy, might want to study how the body heals on its own.

 

With physical problems, the aberrant input needs to be addressed first and then the brain will adapt to the healthy input in a positive way.

Peripheral nerves have a great ability to heal naturally but it's *very* slow.

 

One important thing to note is that some recover fully while others spend a lifetime with facial nerve damage (ranging from reduced feeling, to numbness, to burning pain in small patches or large regions of the face). It depends on your (not measurable) biological healing ability and the extent of the surgical damage (nerve may only be confused or stretched, but they can also be severed if there is a complication).

I agree that scientists will want to understand how the body can recover on its own to induce that process in patients who aren’t so lucky.

 

I hope that's the case, but I don't think science knows enough about this process.

 

As I understand it, neuroplasticity underlies the brain's ability to develop new pathways when old ones are damaged, or for healthy pathways to compensate for damaged ones. So it seems to me that tinnitus marks a failure of neurplasticity - the brain's inability to identify tinnitus as "wrong," and rewire itself to get rid of it.

If regenerative medicine works, I'm not sure why success would rely on neuroplasticity. Rather, wouldn't it be just the opposite: facing a failure of neuroplasticity to resolve tinnitus on its own, reestablishing the original pathways through regenerative medicine, the pathways that don't require neuroplasticity, is what's able to finally resolve it.

 

I agree, and maybe that's what genuine habituation is: neuroplasticity resolving tinnitus for those people lucky enough to have sufficiently neuroplastic brains.

At the same time, maybe there's something particularly vexing about tinnitus that makes it that much more challenging for the brain to resolve on its own, at least for many people.

Because there are examples of neuroplasticity that seem miraculous, where a severely damaged brain somehow reanimates, and examples where seemingly healthy brains are stymied by comparatively mild trauma, perhaps something similar is happening with tinnitus. The same physical damage, the same audio trauma destroying the same number of auditory hairs, is generating totally different tinnitus outcomes based on some X factor in neuroplasticity.

 

I believe habituation is people who don't have an emotional response to tinnitus after a while (or less of one), not that tinnitus is changed in any way.

Habituation doesn't decrease tinnitus volume.

 

That's depressing! Probably true, but depressing!

Can't imagine ever cozying up to this evil sound.