Information from my classes and peer reviewed literature on neuroscience and biology psychology led me to find out a few things about the brain that have stuck with me. One of these findings is the critical concept of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, is the ability that your brain has to change and adapt to the environment and events to which it's exposed. For example, learning the piano or moving into a completely new culture are ways that can test your brain plasticity.
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Every time a new experience transpires, neurons in your brain get stimulated, become active, and begin to fire. All the neurons that fired in response to the stimuli begin to make connections with each other.
Max Cynader, the Canadian research chair in brain development, explains it more succinctly: “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
As these neurons fire together repeatedly, more connections are made between them making them stronger. The strength of these neurons and their neural connections have a direct impact on a person's working memory.
Stronger neurons equal stronger memory.
Enhancing one’s neuroplasticity is important since it shows how much your brain can change and take in new information. The more neuroplasticity that a person has, the more new skills and knowledge a person a can pick up.
In order to increase your neuroplasticity, one should focus on getting a goodnight's sleep and increasing physical exercise.
It use to be speculated that we are born with all the brain cells that we are ever going to have in a lifetime, but this is not true.
Research has shown that doing physical exercise and getting healthy amounts of sleep increases neurogenesis, which is the creation of more brain cells.
When it comes to type of the physical exercise, both cardio and resistance training are equally as important. This is especially true once you begin to age.
Once you get older, your hippocampus shrinks and thus your cognitive processing gets slower along with your memory. This is not the case for people who regularly do physical exercise, in fact the opposite happens.
A longitudinal study found that people who regularly do exercise do not have shrinking hippocampuses and some can even grow.
Sleep is important because the hippocampus is active during sleeping hours and this helps with the neural connections and the strength of a person’s memory.
Neuroplasticity is still being actively researched and there is still so much more to learn. The brain is the next frontier and I cannot wait to see what else it has to offer.
For more on neuroplasticity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chr3rQ6Vpcw
