Biological Pathway
Neuroplasticity
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The brain's capacity to change its own wiring: strengthening or weakening synapses, growing or pruning dendritic spines, and in a few regions producing new neurons. It is an ordinary continuing property rather than a special state, and it underlies both learning and recovery after injury. Records tagged here concern signals that alter that capacity, most often through neurotrophic factors such as BDNF.
Why it matters here
Nearly every nootropic claim reduces to a claim about this pathway, and the supporting measurement is usually a protein level in rodent brain tissue, an animal_in_vivo finding that does not carry across to human cognition.
What it is not
Not a synonym for better cognition, and not automatically desirable: the same mechanisms entrench unwanted patterns as readily as useful ones. It is also not neurogenesis, the making of new neurons, which is far more limited in adult humans than popular writing suggests.
Also called
- neuroplasticity
- synaptic plasticity
- neural remodeling
- neural plasticity
- synaptic remodeling
Synaptic plasticity strictly means change at the synapse, which is one part of neuroplasticity rather than all of it.