How the brain heals after stroke or brain-injury

How brain plasticity makes recovery possible, even years after a stroke or TBI

At one point scientists believed the brain stopped growing new neural pathways as we grew older. Our brain grows the most during childhood, but the latest research shows you can grow new pathways at any point in your life. If your brain has been injured by stroke or trauma, you can encourage neuroplasticity by challenging your brain. Just like physical therapy challenges your muscles to grow stronger, you can challenge your brain and cause it to grow.

What is Neuroplasticity (brain-plasticity)?

In his book Neuroplasticity, neurobiologist Moheb Costandi describes our brain's ability to form new neural connections that "route around" damaged neurons, to compensate for injury due to stroke, TBI, etc. Here's an analogy that people I've helped have found helpful over the last 30 years.

Neural pathways are roads for your brain signals
Your brain is like a city, with roads connecting all the little areas. We'll call it Brainville. Those roads are analogous to the neural pathways in your brain. Your brain sends neural signals along these pathways. A very oversimplified example would be: if you are trying to say the word for a picture of an apple, your brain sends neural signals from the visual cortex (which sees the apple) to the Broca's area (which is involved in producing speech to say apple).  The actual neurology is more complex than this, but you get the idea.  

That’s like cars driving in our little imaginary city, Brainville (population: 1 Billion Neurons). The cars are like neural signals traveling along neural roads from one part of the city to another.

When you have a brain injury, it’s like part of the road system in Brainville has been damaged and the road is closed just like our damaged neural pathway.

Now you can’t get from home to the library because the route you normally take is damaged. This means your brain can't access the word for library. Or eat, or I love you.

On the real road, if a road is closed, you take a detour. That's what your brain does when there is damage: it routes those signals around the damaged neurons in Brainville.  

The trick is that you have to learn the detour path. That’s what rehab is: teaching your brain the new path. Literally building a new path in your brain. The more time you spend on that the better your brain learns the new path.  About eight hours a week is a great goal. My home therapy course, below, has worksheets, etc. you can print out for home therapy.  Or you can get a free therapy plan and get you up to 9 weeks of therapy.