Think Your Brain Can't Change?

Image via Wikipedia Do you think that you are pretty much stuck with who you are, and how you are living, because you are "hard-wired" for this or that tendency or behavior? At one time, such thinking was pretty orthodox, across the board. But a recent explosion of neuroscience evidence paints a very different picture. We have known for a long time that the act of learning something is accompanied by necessary changes in the connections between and among the neurons in the brain. What is clear now is that the actual structure of the brain changes along with new behaviors and experiences. A good introductory book about all this is Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.

And what caught my eye, occasioning this post, is a really amazing new study that vividly illustrates what Sharon Begley is saying. The act of learning to juggle creates visible changes in brain tissue, after as little as one week of juggling practice! Here is part of what the folks at Mind Hacks had to say about it:

A new study just published in PLoS One reports that learning to juggle alters the structure of motion detection areas in the brain within as little as 7 days.

Led by neuroscientist Joenna Driemeyer, the study... took 20 non-jugglers and asked them to learn to juggle, [and] scanned them after 7, 14 and 35 days.

After only 7 days, a motion specialised part of the occipital lobe known as V5 had increased in density... the changes were maintained over the subsequent weeks of practice, but these areas returned to their pre-learning state after several weeks without juggling.

This is an interesting example of rapid 'neuroplasticity', the ability of the brain to adapt structurally to new situations.

So: Can you change your brain, by voluntarily changing your behavior? Yes, you can. And, having done so, you will have changed some aspect of who you are. This research helps us to begin to answer questions such as this: How and why is it that a regular, sustained meditation practice is effective in various ways (by improving mood, reducing anxiety, and reducing attentional deficits, for example)?. And this type of research also gives us hope that there will be cognitive and behaviorally-based interventions that can significantly help people who have had strokes, and those who are developing dementia.