How can the same brain plasticity-based training programs help individuals with cognitive losses arising from normal aging, exposure to IED explosions, or chemotherapy?

Over the years, I have specifically discussed the potential value of intensive brain plasticity-based brain fitness training for individuals with ALL of these (and other, related) personal histories. How in the heck can “one size fit all”? How on earth can the losses in mental faculties stemming from an explosion of little bubbles in the brain accompanying an IED blast be related to those derived from a slow, deliberate chemical poisoning of regenerative processes in the brain designed to limit the proliferation of cancerous tissues that are usually not even IN the brain, or to the normal deterioration of the fabric of the brain that accompanies getting older? Understanding the nature of the basic neurological processes that account for how the brain encodes and “represents” our experiences is a key to understanding what these assaults on our brains have in common. The brain encodes our perceptions, thoughts and actions by generating coordinated, distributed neuronal responses that “represent” the ongoing details of each successive event. Three aspects of this encoding are crucial for generating crystal-clear representations of ongoing experiences. FIRST, the brain has to accurately represent the DETAILS of these “input” or “output” streams. For example, in a normal young adult, the cerebral cortex areas representing incoming speech normally samples information in detail with narrow sound-frequency-selective”ch...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Source Type: blogs