In Developmental Psychology we went over developmental brain plasticity today, there are two types; experience-expectant plasticity and experience-dependent plasticity. It caught my attention, because lately I've been thinking about my thoughts and such more scientifically. Experience Dependent is how I had understood the brain worked, being able to change things through conditioning and growing up and just experiencing things, throughout life.
Then she brought up experience-expectant plasticity, and it made me think a little, and then made me nervous. You see, experience-expectant plasticity is things every human brain expects to experience, like light to the eyes or noise to the ears, and when it does experience these things normally you turn out fine. But if you're born deaf, for example, your brain will grow differently, and the part that worries about hearing will worry about other things (why deaf people's other senses are above average). Major difference between the two though is the experience-expectant plasticity only change while the brain is still developing, so like putting an eye-patch over an adult with a lazy eye would not have an effect while it would with a child.
And I'm worrying because, I'm 20, and for the most part my brain is done developing. Sure my prefrontal cortex grows maybe for 5 more years and is fairly important, but I'm just thinking, what if I missed my window of opportunity to use the eye-patch, metaphorically speaking. I know my brain's miswired in some areas without question, I never knew there was an deadline to when it can still be altered.
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