How Do You Activate Neuroplasticity?

10 Principles of Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brain and body to change in response to our learning and experience. This incredible ability of the human nervous system can be deliberate. Our brain can decide that we want to learn a new language, or be less emotionally reactive or more emotionally engaged, and we can undergo a series of steps that allow our brain to make those changes deliberately. And amazingly, as we practice, it eventually becomes reflexive for us to do that. 

Rewiring our brain might sound pretty complicated, but it's absolutely something we can do at home. Let’s look at a few of the defining principles of neuroplasticity:

1. Use it or lose it
   If we don’t actively use our brain to perform a certain task, the part of the brain that’s responsible for carrying out that task starts to lose the ability to do so. This is true for everyone and everything you do: say you take piano lessons when you are young, but you stop taking them and don’t touch a piano for 10 years. When you try to play the piano again, you may be able to remember a little bit at best; certainly, you won’t be able to play as well as you did when you were practising regularly. You literally lost some of the brain cells, and the connections between cells, responsible for playing the piano. You didn’t use it, so you lost it.
   

1. Train it to improve it
   Our brain will change in response to specific learning or training. When a certain task is learned, the part of the brain responsible for that task forms stronger connections between those brain cells. As a result of this, the person becomes better at doing that task– the same thing happens when we experience something new.
   

2. Specificity
   The nature of the learning or experience dictates the nature of the change in the brain (plasticity).
   If you are training or trying to build muscles in a specific body part, for example, using only your right hand or your left leg, the changes that happen to the brain will be the largest in the areas of the brain responsible for those body parts. Similarly, if you are trying to learn a new language, the main change will occur in the part of the brain associated with language development and comprehension.
   

3. Repetition
   Repetition is required for long-term changes in the brain. You need thousands of repetitions to master a skill. The more time you spend practising, the better you perform.
   

4. Intensity
   If you do something that doesn’t challenge you, you won’t see much of a difference. Intensity can be the number of times you perform a task or how difficult it is. Try to find an intensity that is one step above your current level. When you reach that new level, go one more step above that level and keep increasing the intensity.
   

5. Time
   Different forms of change (plasticity) in the brain happen at distinct times during training or learning a new skill. Although change occurs continuously, there are windows of time where progress happens at a faster rate.
   

6. Salience
   In every human brain, there’s a mechanism for remembering important things and forgetting less essential things. Your brain isn’t able to contain photographic memories of every single experience you have in life, so it filters out which memories are more important to retain, and which ones you can live without. You need to have sufficient motivation and attention to the task at hand, and higher emotions and excitement help solidify learning.
   

7. Age
   Training-induced change (plasticity) occurs more readily in younger brains. The young brain is a plasticity machine. During our childhood, adolescence and young adulthood years, we don't have to focus that hard in order to learn new things. This ability to learn passively and with little or no effort is not absent in adults, but it is at lower strengths than in children. However, the adult brain is still capable of extraordinary change. With sustained effort and a healthy lifestyle, adults are just as able to promote positive change and growth in their brains as children.
   

8. Transference
   When you are focused on changing your brain for the better, you may begin to notice that other areas of your nervous system begin to work better and more efficiently. Changing your habits in one area of your life to enhance neuroplasticity will notably increase the overall efficiency of the brain in not only the area of focus but other areas as well.
   

9. Interference
   Neuroplasticity means the brain is always learning. But it doesn’t know the difference between good and bad! Maladaptive habits or practising the wrong things might interfere with the positive changes you want to make.

Last thoughts

Everybody can benefit from neuroplasticity. We just have to harness our brains’ natural ability to adapt to bring positive change to our lives. We can practice this on our own or through coaching or therapy. As a coach, I partner with my clients on this journey and help them bring long-lasting change through performance-enhancing techniques, belief change, and other cognitive change strategies.

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