Brain Fitness The key to embrace a positive change in your life at any age

Life is all about moving on, accepting changes and looking for what makes us stronger and powerful. It is always possible to experience the impossible things. However, very few of us believe on their capabilities to achieve their dreams and keep their brain evolving to the next level. We are afraid to fail at something, and even if we fail, we strive hard to improve ourselves and reward our brain. Most of us think that our brain stops growing after a certain age (by 25 years old). However, newer research has revealed that the brain never stops changing in response to learning and experiences. If you want to know how to evolve your brain, how experiences, learning and memory formation change our brain, keep reading till the end.

Do you know that the world’s most successful people experienced epic failures before their success ?!

Thomas Edison, who was told by his teacher he was ‘too stupid to learn anything’, made 1,000 unsuccessful trials at inventing the light bulb before he succeeds. He admitted that he did not fail 1,000 times but the invention process has 1,000 steps.

From science to sport, Michael Jordan, the best and greatest basketball player ever, was cut from his school team. However, instead of giving up, he stuck on his dream and kept working and improving his performances. Jordan stated that: “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

From sport to business, Bill Gates, the man who revolutionized the tech industry all over the world through his business. However, it was not his first business. His first business failed and even when he become an excellent CEO, he made several big mistakes at Microsoft.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” Samuel Beckett

Success takes time and effort. It is a long journey. The common point of these personalities is that all of them succeeded to react and overcome obstacles in their life. They kept training and evolving their brain which give them the courage and the determination to succeed in the area where they truly belong.

Comfort zone and the fear of change

We human being has a tremendous adaptability to learn from our mistakes and modify our behavior and has the welling to evolve in life and break out of routine. However, there is a huge gap between our goals and our actions, we behave in a very controversy way and do not make first step to achieve our goals. We are overwhelmed by the fear of change and scared to get rid of our comfort zone. We find difficult to unlearn the unhealthy habits as well as to acquire and learn new healthy habits. Do you know why? This is simply because of our addiction to the emotional state they produce, change is difficult, we prefer to remain in situation that makes us unhappy and immerse into unhealthy life style. For instance, people that went through an emotional crisis, find themselves a refuge in eating unhealthy foods, they end up obese with health diseases and find hard to work out their body and strengthen themselves because of the pleasure they get from these foods regardless their illness. What is more, this fear of change, limits our brain development and flexibility to improve ourselves and may lead us to stress, procrastination and depression to name few.

So, why to choose to live this way?! Why we don’t just stop for a while and practice self-talking by asking ourselves if this “comfort zone” really worth it, or we could do better if we accept to sacrifice some “imaginary comfort” to explore our capabilities and change our mindset toward a healthy life style.

So, if you really feel that you want to make substantial changes in the quality of your life, change your perception of the world around you, strengthen the brain cells connections breaking habit of being you, you should start learning about your brain capability to evolve.

                                                        Get ready to learn with me!! I invite you to take a deep breath, because what you will learn from this reading is the first step to embrace a positive change in your life as I did couple of years ago and learn more about our brain ability to break out of routine and rewire our brain using “Brain Plasticity”.

Brain plasticity

Modern research has demonstrated that the shape of our brain changes over times and continues to create new neural pathways and alter existing ones in order to adapt to new experiences, learn new information, and create new memories. Thus, "Brain Plasticity" refers to the brain’s ability to change its synaptic connections and adapt as a result of learning, experience and memory formation (Dr. Joe Dispenza, Evolve your brain). It is how we develop from infancy through to adulthood and how we improve after an injury.

 The brain has the ability to develop new neurons and new synaptic connections. When we learn new activities, skills or experiment new experiences, we stimulate the creation of new connections and new neurons and the reorganization of the existing synapses. The more you practice new learning, the more lasting these synaptic connections become. Reinforcement or repetitive activities will help us to remember new activities/skills, so we can use what we intellectually learned. Our brain plasticity makes this all possible.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Our brain is composed of billions of neurons, each neuron is connected to more than 10000 neurons. At birth, neurons start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Each neuron has approximately 2500 synapses. At the age Three years old, this number increases to 15000 synapses per neuron, according to Gopnick et al., 1999, A theory of causal learning in children : causal maps and bayes nets). As we grow up and become adult, this number increases twice. As we age, old connections are omitted through a process called “synaptic pruning”. It means that weaker synaptic are eliminated while stronger connections are kept and strengthened. So, as long as we don’t experiment a knowledge, it becomes idle. What is more, as neuron must survive, as long as we do not feed it with information’s, it becomes damaged and even die, which affect the brain performance and the person ability to excel in life. So the brain plasticity could enable the development and the pruning of connections depending on our wellness to evolve and change.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, explains in his book, “Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life”: “Whatever the circumstances of a child’s early life, and whatever the history and current state of that child, every human has the built-in power to improve, to change for the better, to significantly restore and often to recover. Tomorrow, that person you see in the mirror can be a stronger, more capable, livelier, more powerfully centered, and still-growing person.”

Our brains are not static and could evolve and change depending on our ability to change, to exercise and rewire our brain. You can not set relaxed into your sofa and wait that the brain plasticity work for you. If you want to build strong body muscles, you should commit to progressively weight lifting.

Does our brain plasticity substantially decreases as we become old?

It is taught that our brain starts to solidify by the age of 25 years old, but thanks to our brain plasticity, that change is still possible after. What differs a child from an adult of thirty or more is that its brain is highly flexible and plastic as it is not yet fully formed. Thus, the adult's brain has so many existing pathways, synapses, that it is hard to break free of them and any changes requires an additional energy. The adult's brain will resist to consume it and choose the most energy efficient path (existing paths). This is to say that, while you won’t have the flexibility to learn and change easily as you were child, you are also not stuck with your developed thoughts forever. Thus, you should constantly exercise and workout your brain, if you want to keep your brain agile and flexible. To create new connections between neurons, you should learn new skills, knowledge and keep practicing.

So, How Learning and experiences change our Brain ?

Our brain is the reflection of all things we have learned and experiences we had. Once we learn something new, we make a new synaptic connection in our thinking brain “Neocortex”, forging new connections and every time we learn something new our brain physically changes. The principal of neuroscience states that the neurons that fire together wire together, and as you begin to learn new information, you biologically wire that information into your cerebral architecture. So if learning is making new synaptic connections then remembering is maintaining and sustaining these connections. Our brain learns by “association” and remember by “reinforcement” (Evolve your brain by Dr. Joe Dispenza): By association means that when we learn new information, our brain builds new connections on the previous patterns of neuronal interactions to store it. This learning keeps our brain functioning at optimum capacity, train it to remain active into old age and help us to learn new things, related to the previous learning, more easily. So, Learning changes the physical structure of our brain. However, if we do not practice this learning over and over, and here comes the role of experience, the synaptic connections will become weak and eliminated due to the “synaptic pruning” process.

So, you are the architect of your brain! Your brain will change accordingly with your willing to evolve and live a more optimal life, where you are free from routine and where you will smoothly progress in your career and upgrade your mindset.

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Take away,

Your brain is able to change and create new neurons in response to experiences and learning you acquire in life, regardless your age. You will not wait that the brain plasticity work for you, as it was the case when you were child. To optimize your brain fitness, you should embrace new lifestyle and integrate progressively and smoothly new activities in your life such as : daily physical training, engaging in new learning and experiences, practicing “mindfulness” and developing your memory abilities. In the next paper, I will discuss more about emotional memory and how we can enhance our memory in more efficient way.

By Dr. Imane Essaadi, Eng, Phd