Revealing The Machinery Underlying The 'Plastic' Juvenile Brain

... Among the central mysteries of neurobiology is what properties of the young brain enable it to so adeptly wire itself to adapt to experience -- a quality known as plasticity. The extraordinary plasticity of the young brain occurs only during a narrow window of time known as the critical period. For example, children deprived of normal visual stimulation during an early critical period of the first few years of life suffer the permanent visual impairment of amblyopia. ...