Neuroplasticity: Why Our Brains are Malleable Like Our Bodies

This is an except from Mind Macros 05.

“‘Plasticity,’ says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, is ‘the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span.’ Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with ‘each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness'.

“Neuroplasticity, argues Pascual-Leone, is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system ‘to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.’ The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.

“Natural selection, writes the philosopher David Buller in Adapting Minds, his critique of evolutionary psychology, ‘has not designed a brain that consists of numerous prefabricated adaptations’ but rather one that is able ‘to adapt to local environmental demands throughout the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands.’ Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind—over and over again.” — From The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr.

Since discovering neuroplasticity, we have learned that genes do not determine our character.

We can alter our most deeply rooted habits and behaviors with consistent effort.

New pathways are formed in our brains when we learn something novel. A similar process occurs when we form a habit. When we repeat a behavior, our brains turn this set of actions into a circuit that we can perform unconsciously. As a result, we save mental energy and can perform routine tasks without conscious effort.

Our habits, behaviors, and thought patterns are nothing more than predefined circuits that fire continuously. Hence the expression, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Because of neuroplasticity, we know that these circuits are not hardwired and can be reprogrammed. We can sculpt our brains, just as we can sculpt our bodies.