Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,15

better functioning brain, I challenge you to reconsider.

As I stated earlier, the brain is capable of being molded and shaped, meaning that at any point anyone can decide to change the way their brain functions. While it’s easy to assume that the individual who grew up in a more stressful, unsupportive environment may not wind up reaching their full potential due to their brain’s development under those circumstances, growing evidence suggests those people are able to thrive and reach new levels of success due to the mindset they are forced to develop in such a situation. Based on the number of successful people who overcame troubled upbringings, it may be that a difficult childhood or challenging upbringing breeds resilience among other attributes that lead to success.

UNDERSTANDING NEUROPLASTICITY

What can we learn from the brains of London taxicab drivers?

This is the question neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College London posed as she considered the vast amount of information held in the brains of the city’s cab drivers, appropriately called “The Knowledge.” To earn their licenses, applicants traveled by moped through a specific section of the city—a 10-kilometer radius of Charing Cross station—for three to four years, memorizing the maze of 25,000 streets within as well as the thousands of attractions they supported. Even after this intense study, only about 50 percent of applicants pass the series of licensing exams. Perhaps, thought Maguire, those successful had larger than average hippocampi.

Maguire and her colleagues discovered that London taxi drivers did indeed have “more gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than people who were similar in age, education, and intelligence who did not drive taxis. In other words, taxi drivers had plumper memory centers than their peers. It seemed that the longer someone had been driving a taxi, the larger his hippocampus, as though the brain expanded to accommodate the cognitive demands of navigating London’s streets.”3

The London Taxi Cab Study provides a compelling example of the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to reorganize and transform itself as it is exposed to learning and new experiences. Having to constantly learn new routes in the city forced the taxi cab drivers’ brains to create new neural pathways. These pathways changed the structure and size of the brain, an amazing example of the limitless brain at work.

Neuroplasticity, also referred to as brain plasticity, means that every time you learn something new, your brain makes a new synaptic connection. And each time this happens, your brain physically changes–it upgrades its hardware to reflect a new level of the mind.

Neuroplasticity is dependent on the ability of our neurons to grow and make connections with other neurons in other parts of the brain. It works by making new connections and strengthening (or weakening, as the case may be) old ties.4

Our brain is malleable. We have the incredible ability to change its structure and organization over time by forming new neural pathways as we experience, learn something new, and adapt. Neuroplasticity helps explain how anything is possible. Researchers hold that all brains are flexible in that the complex webs of connected neurons can be rewired to form new connections. Sometimes, that means the brain compensates for something it has lost, as when one hemisphere learns to function for both. Just as there are people who have suffered strokes and have been able to rebuild and regain their brain functions, those that procrastinate, think excessive negative thoughts, or can’t stop eating junk food may also rewire and change their behaviors and transform their lives.

If learning is making new connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections. When we struggle with memory or experience memory impairment, we are likely experiencing a disconnection between neurons. In learning, when you fail to remember something, view it as a failure to make a connection between what you’ve learned and what you already know, and with how you will use it in life.

For example, if you feel that something you’ve learned is valuable in the moment, but that you’ll never use it again, you are unlikely to create a memory of it. Similarly, if you learn something but have no higher reasoning as to why it’s important to you or how it applies to your life or work, then it’s likely that your brain will not retain the information. It’s totally normal to have a memory lapse—we’re human, not robots. But if we respond to this lapse in memory with the attitude that “I have a bad memory,” or “I’m not smart enough to remember this,” then we