It’s Never Too Late for Change . . .

Conventional wisdom holds that the brain stops developing by early adulthood, precluding repair of early neurological damage. Two laboratory studies illustrate the great plasticity of the adult mammalian brain.

Researchers investigated whether an enriched environment in adulthood could reverse blindness (amblyopia) produced by temporarily occluding one eye in infant rats. When the rats were adults, the investigators closed the good eye and opened the blind eye; rats were exposed to standard conditions or an enriched environment containing novel objects altered weekly. In rats from the enriched environment (but not controls), visual acuity and binocular vision recovered completely within 2 weeks, and levels of brain-derived neurotrophic facto…