Neuroconstructivism
Neuroconstructivism can therefore be seen as a bridge between Jerry Fodor's psychological nativism and Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
[2][3] Modularity of the brain would require a pre-specified pattern of synaptic connectivity within the cortical microcircuitry of a specific neural system.
[4][5][6] Proponents of the modular theory might have been misled by the seemingly normal performances of individuals who exhibit a learning disability on tests.
Many standardized tasks used to assess the extent of damage within the brain do not measure underlying causes, instead only showing the static end-state of complex processes.
The domain-specific approach in contrast argues for inherent, specific differences within the genes which directly control a person's development.
[10] Such change leads to domain-specificity in adult brains, but neuroconstructivism argues that the key component of the specificity occurred from the domain-general start state.
[10] Human intelligence may be more accurately defined by focusing on the plasticity of the brain and its interactions with the environment rather than inherent differences within the DNA structure.
Dissociations seen in Williams syndrome or autism provide neuroscientists with a means of exploring different developmental trajectories.
[12] This probabilistic epigenesis view of development[13] suggests that instead of following a predetermined path to expression, genes are modified by the behavior and environment of an organism.
Chronic stress reduces the amount of stem cells that grow into neurons, which may explain how it impacts learning and memory.
As a result, they manipulate the brain's neural activation patterns, and thus its structure, leading to constraining effects on the construction of representations in the mind.
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.
[1] 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.
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 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.
[17] 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.
[1] 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.
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 inhibit clarity and thinking.
[27] Alcohol diminishes the brain's capacity to form neural connections and suppresses specific activities and pathways of neurons.
Research performed by neuroscientist Jay Giedd provides strong support for a second period of synaptic plasticity, and he did a case study on his own teenage kids.
[citation needed] 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 suggests that our schemas are rooted in different portions of our brains' processes and gives credibility for its grandiose diversity.
The brain's plasticity leads to ever-changing mental representations through individual proactivity and environmental interactions.
This view directly contrasts previous theories which assumed that disorders arise from isolated failures of particular functional modules.
