Why does Arnold Schwarzenegger have an accent, but Milakunus doesn't?

And why is there a correlation between how tall a person is and how much his salary is likely to be?

Why does an elderly person have a hard time learning a new language, but no trouble

learning the name and face of a new movie star? What would we mean by saying that you are born as many

people, but die as a single one? Welcome to the inner cosmos with me, Egelman. I'm a neuroscientist and

author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about brain plasticity,

which is the ability of the brain to modify itself and how this changes throughout your lifetime.

So we're going to address why it is harder to teach an old dog new tricks and ask whether that is always true.

So let's start 50 years ago.

There was a psychologist named Hans Lucas Toyber at MIT,

and he got curious about what had happened to soldiers who had sustained head injuries in World War II.

Now this was in the 1970s, so the war had been almost 30 years earlier.

So he tracked down 520 men who had sustained brain damage during the battles.

And some had fared well in their recovery, but others didn't have such good outcomes.

And Toyber wanted to understand what the difference was.

So he scoured all the records and he looked for the things that correlated with good outcomes

and bad outcomes.

And you know what he found?

The younger the soldier was when he got the head injury, the better he was now.

And the older the soldier, the more permanent, the damage.

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