Harnessing Neuroplasticity to Improve Our Lives

There are plenty of brain training apps on the market these days, claiming that the games the use will improve your memory, your problem solving ability, or some other aspect of your cognitive capacities. Science, however, is failing to back up these claims, and it appears that the games only really improve your ability to play those specific games?nothing more.

While that is bad news for the creators of those apps, it shouldn’t discourage the rest of us from thinking that brain is untrainable. When done right, the brain is more than capable of moulding and adapting to new challenges and behaviors, and as an article in the Huffington Post points out, it’s something we should all be utilizing:

The idea that we are genetically ?hardwired? for many behaviors is deeply misleading. Yes, we are born with many predispositions, but how those are expressed depend on our lifelong experiences, thoughts, feelings and decisions. We are ALWAYS training our brains, for good or for bad.

The range of possibility?while certainly not unlimited?is much larger than previously thought. The new fundamental understanding is ?cells that fire together wire together.? The brain never stops changing through learning (this is called ?brain plasticity?). And the brain, and the mind that emerges from it, is of course the driver of behavior.

Every experience, thought, or action, exists in our brain as a large firing of neurons, and this firing changes our brain, ever so subtly.?The brain is constantly adapting, and for this reason we are more than able to train?it. Check out the full post for more information.