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Although it has a genetic component, most believe perfect pitch - or absolute pitch - is a primarily a function of early life exposure and training in music, says Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. Hensch is studying valprioc acid, a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by re-creating this critical period in brain development. "It's a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state," Hensch says. Valprioc acid allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7. Hensch's findings have potentially valuable implications for other critical-period-related developments, language being one. So the sci-fi question: in the future, can we come up with a way to reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?

"Even when daydreaming, there is a tremendous amount of communication happening between different areas in the brain... The fact that these areas are synchronized has led many scientists to presume that they are all part of an interconnected network called a resting-state network. ... that these resting-state networks look essentially normal in people missing the corpus callosum link... [it] highlights the brain's remarkable plasticity... the findings are significant when considering the link between brain connections and autism or schizophrenia."

Individuals who are born deaf use the "hearing" part of their brain to feel touch and to see objects, suggests new research that highlights the plasticity of the human brain. The new study, detailed online July 11 in The Journal of Neuroscience, shows that deaf people use the so-called auditory cortex to process both touch and visual stimuli much more than hearing individuals do.

Brain imaging studies have explored the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and, more recently, childhood developmental disorders. However, the neural systems underlying adult rehabilitation of neurobiologically based learning disabilities remain unexplored, despite their high incidence. Here we characterize the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in performance improvements in tutored compared to nontutored dyslexics, and these gains were associated with signal increases in bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Our findings demonstrate that behavioral changes in tutored dyslexic adults are associated with (1) increased activity in those left-hemisphere regions engaged by normal readers and (2) compensatory activity in the right perisylvian cortex. Hence, behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two distinct neural mechanisms, each of which has previously been observed either for remediation of developmental or acquired reading disorders.

Not long ago, I walked into a friend's kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we will find a way to use it for something other than its intended purpose.

"The more he uses technology, the less he uses Braille ... technology is making the nearly 200-year-old writing system more accessible than ever. She shows off an electronic reader that's about the size of a paperback. Instead of having to lug around massive volumes of printed braille, this reader allows Deden to just sweep her fingers over little plastic nubs that rise and fall with each line of text. ... The federation estimates that today only 1 in 10 blind people can read Braille. That's down dramatically from the early 1900s."

"They scanned a total of 79 trainees, just before they started to learn the "All-London" Knowledge [memorizing "25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest"], which can take between two and four years to complete. ... those who had attempted the Knowledge had increased the size of the posterior hippocampus - the rear section of the hippocampus which lies at the front of the brain. ... this advantage appeared to come at a price, as the non-cabbies outperformed them in other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information." The full study: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full.pdf+html

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

Teaching a baby to speak is more art than science. It begins with babble and almost like magic the child says mama and dada, then no, uh-oh, mine, especially mine. But sometimes children struggle to learn to speak. A team of linguists, computer scientists and psychologists in Britain think robots might help explain why that happens. They've created the world's first baby robot, DeeChee; white plastic skin and a smile of red lights and articulated hands that grab and gesture almost like an infant. Now, scientists hope that DeeChee's silicon brain will help explain what's going on in the minds of human babies, specifically, how sensitivity to particular sounds helps infants learn words.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "And the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."

"An array of electrodes receiving input from a non-tactile information source (a camera, for instance) applies small, controlled, painless currents...to the skin at precise locations according to an encoded pattern. The encoding of the electrical pattern essentially attempts to mimic the input that would normally be received by the non-functioning sense. ... When the encoded pulses are applied to the skin, the skin is actually receiving image data." "After training in laboratory tests, blind subjects were able to perceive visual traits like looming, depth, perspective, size and shape."