User:Sumayauser123/sandbox

The developmental path of mental concepts, our cognition, and schemas are changing throughout adolescence and into adulthood, thanks to plasticity. The cognitive frameworks that are built are reflections of the way the brain responds to its culture and the environment. Neural connectivity reaches its highest throughout the teenage years, suggesting that the conceptual frameworks we built during adolescence can be rewired throughout one's entire lifespan, as argued by the idea of dynamic enskillment. This is a hypothesis that attempts to prove the ductility of our minds and its capacity to form unlimited neural connections that shape or reshape our unconscious and conscious pattern of thought and the categories we have built in with us that play a role on our perceptions and interaction with the world. This hypothesis has been used as an attempt to debunk the idea that we are born with knowledge built within, providing supportive conclusions to the argument that we are born as blank slates. Gary Marcus's, The Birth of Mind, takes a position against the idea of tabula rasa, and argues that we are born with patterns of thought and information that has been accumulated innately. This idea is known as neo-nativism. Marcus's ideas account for evolutionary neuroscience in which he specifies that our prewired patterns of thought have evolved to be the way that they are. Marcus's ideas are incongruent with the idea of a plastic brain, because he states that there isn't a prewiring or rewiring that occurs in a person's cognition, but rather, there is a fixation and rigidness due to the genes and recipes they are born with. A prewired brain cannot be plastic. However, Marcus does believe that cognition can be developed and reprogrammed, but argues that that isn't the norm. This idea appeals on the weak side since it does not give account for the way the environment molds our thinking and cognition which shape our memory. Memories are the complete essence of constructing cognition. In Lisa Feldman Barrett's 7 and a Half Lessons about the Brain speaks of schemas in accordance to the affects that we have as a result of an external stimuli, not giving credibility to the stimuli, but to the way the brain and body are affected and react. She argues that the brain's reactions are on account of past experiences which allows for it to think quickly, which is the basis of schemas. Lisa, similar to Marcus, does give credibility to what's within the individual and molded within them since birth that affects our personal internal experiences. Neurconstructivism speaks of schemas as being a cortical specialty that rely on learning and experience for their forms that have been built in earlier years to be changed and rewired. Evidence for proof of this second-window(rewiring) has been made through proof of a second period of synaptic over-production that occurs in the teenage years, which allow for remolding the constraints of one's thoughts that have been wired during infancy. Plasticity is highly available in puberty and creates new models for an individual based on their biological interaction with the environment that are crucial for decision making, personality, and social behavior in later adulthood. This is one of the most crucial reasons teenagers are advised to stay away from alcohol and psychedelic that diminish their judgment and and inhibit clarity and thinking. This second window made available through puberty should not be taken for granted because it is the brain the individual will enter with adulthood at 21. Alcohol diminishes the brain's capacity to form neural connections and suppresses specific activities and pathways of neurons. Alcohol attacks the frontal lobe, which is heightened in development in puberty and keeps growing till the age of 21. Research preformed by a neuroscientist by the name of Jay Giedd performed research that provides strong support for a second period of synaptic plasticity, and he did a case study on his own teenage kids. He reasons with poor decision making teenagers make due to their brains not being fully mature.

Support for the idea that the brain has a capacity to rewire have been found in a research conducted by Takashi Ohnishi have been made on musicians and non-musicians to test what parts of the brain are active during the playing of an Italian orchestra, and it had shown that non-musicians' right temporal lobe and the secondary area of the auditory cortex was activated compared to musicians' brains whose activity was in the left temporal cortex and in the left prefrontal cortex. This study provides support for plasticity and the way skills are intertwined with the working brain relying on neural connections to be built to target different parts of the brain. This study suggests that our schemas are rooted in different portions of our brains' processes and gives credibility for its grandiose diversity.