Neuroplasticity, the
ability of your brain to change both physical form and function in
response to its environment, has become a buzzword promising that you
can “rewire” your brain to improve almost everything. While there is
some truth in these ideas, there’s also a lot of conflicting,
misleading, and erroneous information out there.
The first thing you should know is that your brain is much more
plastic in childhood, and plasticity declines with age. However, the
good news is science has confirmed that you can access neuroplasticity
for positive change in your life at any age, from birth until death.
Harnessing neuroplasticity in adulthood requires intentional effort, but
it can most definitely be accomplished. Here’s how.
Neuroplasticity is an umbrella term referring to the many capabilities of your brain to
reorganize itself over your life in response to your environment,
behavior, and internal experiences. The scientific truth of an adaptive
brain was confirmed in the 1980s and replaced the formerly held belief
that the adult brain was “hard-wired” after critical developmental
periods in childhood.
The capability of your brain to change can be remarkably helpful. All learning and memory happen because of neuroplasticity. Having a neuroplastic brain has enabled people to recover from stroke,
injury, and birth abnormalities, improve symptoms of autism, ADD and
ADHD, learning disabilities and other brain deficits, recover from
depression, anxiety, and addictions, reverse obsessive-compulsive
patterns, and more.
However, this same characteristic, which makes your brain amazingly resilient, also makes it very vulnerable. It’s because of “negative neuroplasticity” that bad habits become ingrained in your brain, valuable skills are lost as your brain declines with age, and some major brain illnesses and conditions show up in humans. For example, depression is basically a brain pattern etched into a person’s brain over time through neuroplastic changes.
(To learn more about neuroplasticity, read 6 Basic Principles of Neuroplasticity.)
Your brain’s capacity for neuroplastic change diminishes over your lifetime.
In the newborn brain, plasticity is always turned “on”. A baby’s brain
has almost no ability to regulate brain change. Because of this,
experiences in infancy have a long-lasting impact. As a baby begins to
learn to control their attention, their brain also learns to regulate
brain change and becomes more selective about what it allows to alter
it. In other words, the “off” switch for neuroplasticity becomes more
dominant.
The early “anything goes” and “always-on” plasticity period comes to an end. Permanent changes are then most often permitted only under certain conditions.
This typically happens around the age of 25. The brain undergoes
physical and chemical changes that increase the power of the plasticity
“off” switch, and it begins to dominate. In other words, their brain
increasingly only allows change to occur when it determines, according
to its own standards, that it is important and wants to change. This is
your chance to direct the process.
In the adult brain, neuroplastic change is happening below conscious awareness most of the time. As explained above, this can help or hurt you. Harnessing and guiding neuroplasticity as an adult does require extra effort and specific circumstances, but science has undoubtedly proven that it can be done. The goal is for you to be able to access neuroplasticity to intentionally change your brain for the better.
Dr. Michael Merzenich, one of the original researchers confirming
plasticity at UCSF, provides a wealth of science-based information about
how to prime the adult brain for neuroplastic change. In his book, Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life,
he lists ten core principles necessary for the remodeling of your brain
to take place. You can read my in-depth explanation of those here.
In this article, I want to cover some new information I came across
by Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Huberman is a tenured Professor of
Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine
with a popular podcast. His laboratory studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance.
In one podcast, “Using Failures, Movement & Balance to Learn Faster,” Huberman suggests that extreme focus followed by rest is the key to making neuroplastic change. He
covers how engaging in new physical behaviors can put the brain in a
neuroplastic state that you can then apply to something else you want to
learn or unlearn. He’s not specifically talking about only accessing
neuroplasticity for physical skills requiring motor movements, like
tennis or dancing. Although you certainly can use it that way if you
want to. He’s talking about using physical movement as a gate to prime
your mind and body to allow you to access plasticity for other things,
such as learning or unlearning emotional and thinking patterns.
When learning something new, Huberman instructs us to focus for as
long as we can and then just “a little bit more”. He says that in that
“little bit more” period when your brain is experiencing the incongruity
of making mistakes is what tells it “Something isn’t working. We need
to make a change” He says that the making of errors over and over again
is what cues your brain to change.
Specifically, he explains that the feedback from errors increases
acetylcholine and epinephrine, which help to heighten focus. And then
when you start getting it “a little bit right” or you can even take
pleasure in the frustration of learning something new, your brain will
reward you with dopamine which increases motivation and is necessary for
plastic change.
The results from his lab and colleagues advise us that adults will
benefit from shorter sessions of focus and learning with smaller
increments of new information followed by “extreme rest”. He suggests
one or two learning sessions per day lasting from seven to 30 minutes
followed by 20 minutes of decompression.
Science tells us there are many other ways to increase
neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells. The two
are closely related. Basically, almost anything that introduces
something new, promotes learning, and gets your brain out of its comfort zone, will encourage neuroplastic change. For example: