Now I know brain science stuff doesn’t seem like it would have that much to do with personal growth or positive psychology or any of the other topics covered here on Improved Lives, but it does. In fact, without neuroplasticity personal growth probably wouldn’t work at all.
A Quick History Lesson
Up until 15 or 20 years ago the general consensus was that your brain grew and developed all through childhood and into the teens and maybe a tiny bit in the early twenties, and then it stopped. It was kind of like cement: it was easily manipulated at first, but as time passed it became harder and harder to shape, until eventually it was simply impossible.
What neuroscientists have discovered, however, is that they were completely wrong. The brain can and does change up until the day you die.
What Neuroplasticity Means for Personal Growth
Neuroplasticity is quite simply the thing that makes personal growth possible. We talk about making changes in our lives and evolving into better versions of ourselves but neuroplasticity is the thing that actually makes it happen. And the most interesting part is that it only works if you put consistent effort into it. Your brain will only rewire itself, or in other words you will only achieve personal growth, if you put consistent effort into it.
To explain how neuroplasticity works to rewire the brain I am going to use a metaphor I heard from Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology researcher and lecturer at Harvard and a personal hero of mine.
Tal explains that building new connections in the brain is a bit like building a river. When you do something like introduce a new habit in to your life, like meditating for instance, the new connections in the brain that are created as a result of that start out as just a little trickle, a tiny little stream.
As you practice and reinforce the habit, the connections in your brain get more established and our metaphorical stream gets more water and a deeper, more permanent stream bed.
Eventually, once your new habit has become completely integrated in to who you are, the stream is a river, with huge amounts of water and a river bed that is almost impossible to get rid of.
This means the new connections in your brain are firm and established, like the river, and even if the water stops flowing, the river bed will remain there for a long time, should you ever choose to send some more water down it again.
That is, in a nut shell, how neuroplasticity works. It gradually reshapes the brain. It doesn’t happen over night, it takes a long time. But if you stick it out, if you keep trying to change and you keep building that stream in to a river you will become the person you want to be.
Further Reading:
- Brain Plasticity at Wikipedia
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