Rewire Your Brain: How Neuroplasticity Can Transform Your Life

In this episode, we will explain how neuroplasticity works and how you can use it to improve your life. Throughout life, you are continually changing, shifting, adapting, learning, and becoming who you are. Another way of saying that is that your mind is continually changing, because you are your mind. Of course, your brain is the physical substrate of your mind–the brain is what makes you you. So every change you have ever experienced is a result of your brain changing. Your memories, your sense of who you are, your ability to do even the simplest tasks–all of it is stored as patterns of connections among cells in your brain. And whenever you remember some experience or fact, that is only possible because a certain pattern of neural activity occurs. If the connections weren’t stored as they are, your memories would disappear. Your personality and sense of self also depend on the details of how the cells of your brain communicate with each other and the fact that you are approximately the same person (psychologically speaking) throughout life is a result of connections among neurons and the resulting patterns of neural activity. Your ability to sense and perceive the world and various objects within it is also the result of these connections and their activity. The upshot of all of this is that you are malleable. More accurately, your mind is malleable because your brain is malleable. It is not infinitely malleable and none of us are blank slates at birth or any other time, but all of us can become better, happier, smarter versions of ourselves.