WTF is Neuroplasticity

Bella Dane (0:02)

Hi, I'm Bella Dane and this is How to Stop Being a Loser, where I chat about things I'm absolutely not qualified to talk about, but I'm randomly very interested in. I do my best to learn from industry professionals, and that's what I share on as much as science evidence and real life lessons as possible.

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode. I'm really excited about today's topic because we're talking about neuroplasticity and what the fuck it is. I feel like neuroplasticity has become such a buzzword in media and it gets misinterpreted a lot. A lot of people have their own opinions on neuroplasticity and it's confusing. So I want to clear it up because I truly think it's one of the most powerful science backed tools we have access to right now, because it's essentially rewiring the brain, how we can rewire the brain, something where we can change our habits, our behaviors, our perceptions, and our lives through neuro or neuroplasticity. And it's something that I talk about a lot, but I realize I haven't done an episode on, and it's truly the most interesting, most powerful thing I've learned in neuroscience. So what the fuck is neuroplasticity? We're going to talk about it today. The first thing I want to say is if you're someone who says, oh, that's just the way I am or that's just who I am, you don't understand the potential of your own mind and the power that you have over your brain and your perceptions and the way that you look at things. And that is neuroplasticity. One of my favorite quotes by Aristotle is you are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And the one thing I have learned throughout the 2 to 3 years I've been reading and learning about neuroplasticity is that you are what you repeatedly do at the end of the day. And if I were to sum everything in this podcast up to that, if you were to take one thing away from all of the neurological science jargon I'm about to throw at you, it's that you are what you repeatedly do, and you are shaping your brain through what you choose to do every single day. So starting off with neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to rewire itself and create new neural connections and organize existing neural circuits and neural connections, which is crazy. And I know that that might sound like, oh well, duh. Like everyone says, rewire of the brain. But actually, for most of history, we thought that when you hit adulthood, when you hit 25 years old, your brain is fixed. It's decided this algorithm, it's designed in architecture for you, and that's what you're running off of. Through childhood, we've always known that in childhood, the brain is very plastic. Neuroplasticity, plasticity, plastic. It means malleable. So you can kind of think of it as like not a hard plastic, maybe a more a more moldable plastic, but that's what that means. So that's why a child who's, you know, 4 or 5 years old, 6 or 7 years old, can learn eight different languages with no accent because the brain is extremely plastic malleable. Because neuroplasticity is is very heightened until you're about 25 once you hit 25 Okay. So the brain is designed until you're 25 to design a specific house for you to live in based off of your experiences. And once you hit 25, that's why it becomes so much harder to learn a new language in adulthood, because the brain is is sort of more fixed. What we're learning now is that's not necessarily as binary as we thought it was. So actually, now scientists know that the brain is sort of customized until you're 25, but with enough focus, you can change your brain in, in the exact at the same level of robustness, if not more that you can in childhood. It just takes deliberate attention and focus. And I'm going to teach you guys how to do that today. And when I say new neural connections, create new neural connections, create new and reorganize old ones, all of those connections and circuits are associated with your perception, your opinions, your habits. Like if you are awful at focusing.

You have neural circuits associated with being awful at focusing. If you are a really positive person, you have neural circuits that are strong and associated. That's what I should say there strong. So if you're really bad at focusing, it's because you have neural circuits that are really, really strong at reinforcing being bad at focusing. And the ones associated with being good at focusing are weak. In very, very simple terms, I'm oversimplifying it because I am worried more about you all understanding it than me being 500% accurate. So does that make sense? So that's why I'm saying you are what you repeatedly do. So the more you do something and again, this is oversimplified. I'm gonna get into the science. But the more that you do something, the better you're going to get at it. So if you train the brain to be lazy, procrastinate, and eat junk food and you do that over and over again. You're training the brain to get better at it, because those neural circuits are strengthened every time you repeat that behavior. Does that make sense? So all of those neurons, all of this neural circuitry in your brain. Is habits, behaviors, perceptions, opinions. And that's why if you can change your brain, you change your life because you're only able to perceive anything from one perspective. And it's your own. It's your brain. So the brain doesn't really. What's that quote? I love this quote so much. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. And that's so true. You can only view things from the lens that your brain has been customized to see through. Does that make sense?