The primary objective of this review article is to summarize how the neuroscience of brain plasticity, exploiting new findings in fundamental, integrative and cognitive neuroscience, is changing the therapeutic landscape for professional communities addressing brain-based disorders and disease. After considering the neurological bases of training driven neuroplasticity, we shall describe how this neuroscience-guided perspective distinguishes this new approach from (a) the more-behavioral, traditional clinical strategies of professional therapy practitioners, and (b) an even more widely applied pharmaceutical treatment model for neurological and psychiatric treatment domains. With that background, we shall argue that neuroplasticity-based treatments will be an important part of future best-treatment practices in neurological and psychiatric medicine.

The purpose of this review is to summarize how our perspective about the neuroscience of brain plasticity, informed by perceptual, experimental, and cognitive psychology, has led to the designs of a new class of therapeutic tools developed to drive functionally distorted and damaged brains in corrective directions. How does neuroplasticity science inform us about optimal therapeutic program designs? How do we apply that science, using modern technology, to drive neurological changes that address both the neurobehavioral distortions and the resulting behavioral deficits that are expressed in specific neurological and psychiatric disorders? By what strategies can we achieve the strongest and most complete rehabilitative corrections? These are questions that we have extensively explored in our efforts to establish new medical applications of neuroplasticity-based therapeutics. Here, we summarize the state of this rapidly emerging area of translational neuroscience, beginning with an expl

We examined the impact of variability in speech stimuli on improvement of general performance and on accessibility to low-level information as a function of practice. Listeners had to discriminate between two similar words in noise in two configurations that differed only in their low-level binaural information, which was either null or maximal. The difference in performance quantifies the use of binaural low-level information. These configurations were presented in three training protocols: in separate blocks; in a consistently interleaved manner; and in a randomly mixed manner. The first protocol enabled optimal use of the low-level binaural cues already at the first training session. The second, consistently interleaved protocol required more than one training session to reach the same performance. The final, mixed protocol did not enable optimal use of the low-level cues even after multi-session training. Interestingly, training with the first two protocols transferred to the mixe

We investigated the effect of task difficulty on the dynamics of auditory cortical responses. Whole-scalp magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals were recorded while subjects performed a same/different frequency discrimination task on equiprobable tone pairs applied in blocks of five, which were separated by a 10 s intertrial interval. Task difficulty was manipulated by the interpair frequency difference. The manipulation of task difficulty affected the amplitude of the N100m response to the first tone and the latency of the N100m response to the second tone in each pair. The N100m responses were smaller and peaked significantly later in the difficult than in the easy condition. The later processing field (PF) responses were longer in duration in the difficult condition. In both conditions, the duration of the PF response was negatively correlated with the subject's performance in the task, and was longer in the less successful subjects. The PF response may thus reflect the subjects' ef

Revealing the relationships between perceptual representations in the brain and mechanisms of adult perceptual learning is of great importance, potentially leading to significantly improved training techniques both for improving skills in the general population and for ameliorating deficits in special populations. In this review, we summarize the essentials of reverse hierarchy theory for perceptual learning in the visual and auditory modalities and describe the theory's implications for designing improved training procedures, for a variety of goals and populations.

The ability to both perceive and understand speech accurately depends on the loss of information along the acoustic-to-phonological hierarchy of auditory processing. A general theory of hierarchical processing in the brain predicts the conditions under which we can or cannot do both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]