Neuroplasticity and Behavior Change
If you opened this post for the adorable photo of Austin pulling dinosaurs out of a volcano along with some vague curiosity about why we’re trying to make you read about brain stuff, we hope you’ll stay and read on! If you’re wondering whether neuroplasticity really is important to dog training, it absolutely is. And taking a minute to give this post a read might help you better understand a big part of the why behind your dog’s training plan.
Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to form and reorganize neural connections. These new or reorganized connections occur in response to experiences, particularly those that are repeated and/or occurring in association with a strong emotional response.
For most species, the brain experiences its highest level of neuroplasticity during critical early development periods. However, neuroplasticity persists through adulthood. That means at any age, we and our dogs have the ability to generate new neurons and neural connections.
What does that mean in the context of behavior? It means that we can learn new behavioral responses, change existing behavior patterns, and make new emotional associations throughout our lifetimes. It also tells us that when we’re doing so, we are quite literally altering the pathways in our brains. Not only is that a good reminder of the effort positive, sustained behavior change can take, it’s a good reminder of why we should be mindful when deciding how we’re going to engage in it.
When engaging in behavior modification, we often seek to build and strengthen new neural connections in the brain through repetition and repetitive pairing with positive experiences while weakening existing undesired connections by preventing our dogs from practicing those behaviors and associated negative emotional responses. This is how new behaviors are built and existing behaviors are replaced.
In the context of arousal issues and emotional regulation, for example, we can reset to a healthier baseline by helping a dog spend the majority of their time in a more relaxed state where they are set up to practice and be reinforced for healthier behavioral choices.
Dr. Jennifer Cattet explains it this way:
“Donald Hebb (1949), father of the Hebbian theory was the first one to figure out that learning happens because when neurons repeatedly fire at the same time, they form connections with one another, they become associated. The more they fire together, the more those connections will become stronger, forming habits over a period of time. We can think of them like roads in our head. When we first learn a new skill, the information between the different parts of the brain that are associated with the action, travel on dirt roads with multiple detours. As we repeat the behavior over and over, the dirt roads gradually develop into paved roads. We think less about what we need to do and get better and faster at it. Finally, over time, the roads turn into highways and we can go much faster and without much thought. We’re now traveling on automatic pilot, or in other words, habits have formed. On the other hand, when a road is no longer traveled, it will gradually break down through a process of erosion and potentially disappear altogether. The old, “use it or lose it”.
Leash reactivity provides another good example. In this case, we want to prevent the dog from practicing the reactivity as much as possible by keeping them under threshold while strongly and consistently setting up for and reinforcing both a positive emotional response to the thing they are reactive to and an alternative default behavior. Seeing another dog might start to mean check in with mom and get a snack instead of barking and lunging. For that to happen successfully, we need to effectively control for a number of variables including the strength of our reinforcer. Strong positive emotional connections and new default behaviors aren’t usually built with stale dog biscuits.
This formula exists in some way for the majority of behavior change. Prevent the dog from practicing the unwanted behavior and associated negative emotional response so the existing highway (neural pathway) starts to breakdown while we also strongly and consistently reinforce the behavior and associated positive emotional response we want our dog to build so we can establish that new dirt road that we then pave into a smooth, easily accessed highway. In many cases, this involves a component of counter conditioning and desensitization which you can read more about here in a great overview by Zazie Todd.
However, neuroplasticity works the other way too. If the behaviors and emotional responses a dog is practicing are unhealthy, unsafe, and/or negative, those are the neural connections we are strengthening. This has important implications for the training methods we choose to use. Here is Dr. Jennifer Cattet again:
”If we’re trying to help the dog, based on what we know about how things get wired in the brain, It’s essential to keep the dog under threshold or at most at threshold during the treatment. When using coercion-based methods, the common approach is to place the dog over threshold, then punish the dog for reacting. The assumption here is that with repetition, the dog will inhibit the reactions towards the stimulus. Unfortunately, this technique generally works only short term with a strong potential to backfire. The dog initially inhibits the reactivity but the connections in the brain between the stimulus and the emotional reactions have now strengthened and we’ve just added a new connection: presence of stimulus = punishment.”
The fallout of using punishment that relies on fear and/or pain to manipulate behavior is significant and once we have done so, our path forward can be harder. The stronger an emotional response, the stronger the connection it creates in the brain. Just as we can go big on the positive to use this to our advantage, so too can a significant negative experience be harder to change. And we don’t want to make behavior change any harder than it already is or add the risk of additional complications when there’s no reason to. Eileen Anderson has a great overview of what those unnecessary risks look like.
Often, things like setting up an environment to help a dog succeed, working at a dog’s pace, and consistently providing positive reinforcement appear very simple and not especially flashy. But this is how we build healthy behaviors and emotional responses that are strong enough to endure and those seemingly simple actions quite literally have the capacity to reorganize neural connections in the brain. Let’s make sure we’re using that capacity in a careful, informed, ethical and compassionate way.
