Turns out you CAN teach an old brain new tricks, according to Neuroplasticity at bigThink.
I would disagree with the opening sentence: “Your brain is more flexible than we’ve ever thought before.” I think that many people have thought/said/believed that the brain was very flexible. But we’ve been told so often that we were wrong that I started buying into that.
I’ve seen from my father’s experience that the brain is massively adaptive. “After a stroke, for instance, your brain can reorganize itself to move functions to undamaged areas.” Yep.
Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, has studied how the brain responds to dramatic changes in peoples’ environments.
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Charney is using this research to conduct psychological therapies that can improve learning and memory, and solve problems with anxiety and depression.
I don’t know that we have to have a dramatic change in environment, but maybe we do. Maybe we are just doing the same old thing and getting the same old response unless we have a dramatic change. What dramatic changes can we make to teach our brains new tricks?