Improved Lives

Photo Credit

I’ve talked on Improved Lives before about how neuroplasticity is what makes personal growth work, and there is a really exciting new study that backs that up in a dramatic way.

In this study, researchers got the study participants to learn how to juggle, but before they did, they took brain scans to use as a baseline for future scans.

After just seven days they scanned the juggler’s brains again, and what they found was that the structure of the juggler’s brains had actually changed in just seven days:

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

Learning a new skill had literally changed these people’s brains after just seven days of practice. So when you implement a new habit or start to change something significant about yourself, you’re changing your brain, and you’re doing it quite soon too, it doesn’t take long for the change to take place in your brain.

It’s important to remember though that after the study participants stopped juggling, the changes went away. That’s a great cautionary note: it’s easy to change your brain, and it’s just as easy to see all that change get flushed away by disuse.

Don’t Let Your New Skills Stagnate

One other important thing the researchers found was this:

Also, the fact that changes seemed to occur at the beginning of the learning cycle but that further practice maintained but didn’t cause additional changes led the researchers to speculate that learning a variety of new things, rather than simply practising old skills, may be most effective in terms of brain structure alterations.

In other words, learning something new but simple like juggling doesn’t really do much for you. Instead, you have to keep going. Evolve your changes, take them a step further, go somewhere with them and use them in novel ways.

An example of this would be speed reading. Speed reading is a very useful skill to have, but it would be a very easy skill to learn and then let fall in to disuse. So if you learned to speed read you would be well advised to push your new skill further by say, trying to read faster and faster. Then take it to the next step and learn complementary skills like the method of loci for memorization, so you remember what you read better.

The bottom line is that by understanding how neuroplasticity works, you can more effectively solidify new skills and build upon your success.

Further Reading:
- Juggling can change brain structure within 7 days

Popularity: 9% [?]

Have you subscribed yet?