ABSTRACT
Brain plasticity is sensitive to many factors, including age, gender, and hand preference. Brain plasticity is enhanced in infancy up to adolescence, during which time the process of acquiring information and developing specific skills reaches its peak. On the other hand, aging does not necessarily coincide with a global loss of cognitive functions. One thorny problem is differentiating the effects of normal aging from those of pathological aging at their onset, since the symptoms can coincide and no biological disease markers are at present available. Inter-individual and gender-related cognitive differences have been repeatedly described, but no unanimous consensus has been reached about their nature to what degree they are genetic or reflect the weight of experience or of motivational factors. A further variable impinging on neural plasticity is left-handedness, a trait shared by about 10 percentage of the human population. In comparison to right-handers, left-handers have a more variable, diffuse lateralization of function across the cerebral hemispheres.
