Takao Hensch, PhD, is a professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science. He leads the National Institute of Mental Health Silvio Conte Center on Mental Health Research at Harvard and the International Research Center for Neurointelligence. Dr. Hensch joins John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, on NeURoscience Perspectives to discuss the critical periods of brain development and whether plasticity can be reopened to target and treat disease. He also shares how being multilingual first piqued his interest in how the brain works.