Neuroplasticity: The Science of Changing Your Brain

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about neuroplasticity. We're going to be diving into how to actually change your brain. I think that one of the most beautiful things about being human is that we can literally mold ourselves into whoever it is that we want to be. Because all too often we think, oh, this is who I am, this is who I've always been, and this is who I'm always going to be. And in reality, that that's not true. We can change ourself at any moment, anytime we want to. We just have to take the right steps and actions in order to be able to get ourselves there. And so really, what it comes down to is changing the actions that we take. And if we change the actions enough, those actions will start to become habits. And if we continue those habits long enough, it will actually start to change our brain. Now, when you look at neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity actually means the science of how your brain changes, the science of how to change your brain. And so if there's certain aspects of yourself that you don't enjoy that you want to change, if you take different action, then your life will automatically start to be different. Your brain will start to change and reorganize itself. And this is actually what I'm going to go over today is actually apart from my book, which is chapter 11 on neuroplasticity. And so in my book, there's three parts. Part one is, is what I shared with you guys a couple days ago, which is, you know, how to why you don't take action. Part two is how to take action. In part three, what we're gonna dive into a part of of that, which is chapter 11. I'm gonna share part of it with you is the science of actually changing your brain, creating habits and creating dopamine reward systems. And so when we look at neuroplasticity, I'm actually gonna go through. I'll give you a few quotes from my book that I think are just really important to understand that you can change your brain. This isn't just like some guy who's a podcaster saying, hey, you can decide to be whoever you want to at there's actual, real, legitimate science and fact that that's behind all of this. Inside of my book, I have 73 cited studies of the science. I hired a friend of mine who is a neurologist to go through this book and make sure that everything is scientifically fact in here. And so I'm going to share a couple different studies that are really, really interesting that show you how to change your brain. And so this is the very beginning of chapter 11. It says if you've been in a London taxi cab, you might have noticed how the drivers don't rely on maps or gps. It's not by accident. It actually dates back law that was created in 1865 for horse drawn carriages. And for this, and for some reason, the law still prevents taxi cab drivers from relying on maps. All taxicab drivers in London must pass an intricate test known as the knowledge. That's the actual name of the test. To get their green badge. That means that drivers must memorize, check this every street and know their way around the city much better than the average driver. Given that London has 25,000 crisscrossing streets that are anything but easy to remember in a grid, it's no surprise that it takes some drivers four years to master the area. And half of the applicants fail the test. So here's what's crazy. Ready? Now here's where the science comes in. So neuroscientists studied the impact of this and the and what it had, the impact that it had on the driver's brains. They followed 79 aspiring taxicab drivers for four years as they prepared for the test. In the beginning of the study, the researchers performed MRIs and found that all aspiring drivers had about the same size hippocampus. This is important. All of the drivers had about the same size hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with the kind of memory needed for navigation. After four years, 39 of the drivers had passed the knowledge test. A second MRI was done on all 79 study participants and found that the hippocampi in the brains of the ones who had passed the test were larger than those of the other participants who had failed. During those four years, the brains of the London taxicab drivers had literally changed. So they all had about the same size hippocampus. But what was crazy is after four years, the people who passed the test had larger hippocampi, which is the plural version of hippocampus, which shows you that they weren't born with it, but through dedicated action and practice, they actually changed their brain. And it says this isn't a unique phenomenon. People who read braille develop the area of their brain that is receptive to the sense of touch and it grows over time. And so really what you start to think about and the reason why I want to bring that up and the reason why I want to cover it with you guys is because I really want you to understand that no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you can change yourself and you can change your brain to do the things that you need to do. If you're terrible with memory, you can get your memory to be better. If you're terrible with focus, you can get your focus to be better. If you want to get better at spatial recognition, you can get better with spatial recognition. If you're terrible at math, you can get better with math. If you're not good with music, you can get better with music, you can change if you want to change. So let's go through the actual changes that your brain will go through. And so we have this inside of the book, page 200. There's three steps that your brain will go through when it's starting to change. The first one is a chemical change. And so the chemical change is a short term memory thing, is really what it comes down to. And so when you look at chemical change, let's say that you've never played the piano before. And you sit down with the teacher and the teacher says, okay, I'm going to teach you how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb. And you sit down and you play Mary Had a Little Lamb and they teach you. And maybe you have an hour long session, right? And after the hour long session you're like, damn, I feel like I'm doing pretty good. I feel like I actually kind of got this song down. You can play it pretty well at the end of the hour, right? Let's say you take a week off and you come back a week later and you try to play and it's like, it's not all there. You're not really as good as you were a week ago. It feels like maybe you don't really have it locked into your brain. Have you ever done something like this before? You, you're pretty good at maybe you sit down to play pickleball for the very first time and you're like, oh, I'm getting better after your first couple hours. And you come back a month later and you're like, I can't even hit the damn ball. Well, what happens is it's a short term change, it's a chemical change. It's the electrical signals in your brain didn't rewire at that time. It was just a short change. And that's why you can remember something today and you can forget it tomorrow. That's why you can learn piano today and you can forget how to play it a month from now. It's a short chemical change that's not going to change your brain. How do you change your brain? By showing up consistently over and over and over again. There's a reason why there's the famous quote that says repetition is the mother of all skill is because when you do something once, it's just a short term chemical change in your brain. When you do something day in, day out, day in, day out, it actually starts to change your brain, which goes into part number two, which is structurally changing your brain. So the first step is chemical change. But if you continue to show up and play Mary Had a Little Lamb every single day for 30 days, maybe expand and get a little bit better over the next 30 days, the structure of your brain is actually going to start to change. The synapses in your brain are actually going to start to rewire. And so if you've ever heard the phrase when you're talking about rewiring your brain, they always say neurons that fire together wire together. That means if you consistently do something over and over and over again, your brain will change. And so then you actually start to change the structure of your brain and you actually start to become better at it. So if you play Mary Had a Little Lamb today and then a month try to play it again, you're not going to do it real well. But if you play Mary Had a Little Lamb every single day for 30 days, at the end of 30 days, it's going to basically be wired into your brain. And that's if you've ever played an instrument before. You know what this is like? Like for me, I've been playing guitar since I was 15. I'm 37 now, so 22 years. There's times where I can sit down and try to play a song that I've been playing for so long. And if I pay too, it's really weird. If I pay too much attention, I don't get it. But if I like close my eyes and I just let my brain and my fingers do what they do, I can play the song. It's literally wired into me at this point. And so when you do something over and over and over again, it changes the structure of your brain. Now it goes a little bit further, which is step three, which, where it becomes really crazy. And I have to share this part from the book with you, which is the function of your brain actually starts to change. And so first number one is chemical change. Second is structural change. Third is the function of your brain changes. And so check this out. It says on, on page 202, researchers have scanned the brains of pianists when they are playing and found that their brains pump less blood to the regions associated with fine motor skills when compared to the average person's brain. This mean that the brain. This means that the brain doesn't have to expend as much energy to concentrate. Pianists weren't born that way. Their brains developed over time with practice. So check this real quick. This is what's crazy. You would think that when a pianist sits down to play, if they're a master at this, that their brain would go, hey, we're going to send a lot of blood to this different part of your brain so that you can focus and play even better. But that's not how it works. It does that in the chemical and the structural change, but in the functional change. Your brain requires less blood for you to be able to play this. It's the same thing as if you've ever driven home and you just drive home after work and you're like, oh, my God, I was supposed to stop and get milk and I completely forgot. I don't even. I didn't. I wasn't even paying attention. I drove home. It's because it doesn't need as much energy, it doesn't need as much to function. And so to go a little bit deeper, it says on the same page, another researcher discovered that experienced jazz pianists, while improvising, created different connections in the frontal lobe of their brains compared to those who didn't play the piano. This part of the brain is responsible for problem solving, decision making, and also spontaneity. Which means that these pianists could turn off parts of their brain that would automatically provide a stereotypical response that allowed them to play in a way that was truly represent, was a true representation of who they were and not copy someone else. So check this out. This is crazy. So as someone becomes a experienced jazz pianist, it changes the function of their brain. And the part of their brain that it changes is the same part of their brain for problem solving, decision making, and spontaneity. Which means that as they become a better piano player, they become better with problem solving and decision making outside of playing the piano. Which means that they have literally, by being a piano player, changed the function of their brain. What in the hell? How amazing is that? It shows you that when you decide to do something, even if you're like, I want to pick up pickleball sure, you'll get better at pickleball, but you'll also get better at other parts of your life because you're going to change the chemical part of your brain, the structural parts of your brain, and then long term, the functional parts of your brain, which shows you that you need to continue to keep showing up. You need to do something consistently over and over and over again. Repetition is a mother of all skills. And so if you want to learn something, you're not going to learn it really quick and just automatically. It's going to take you time and it's going to take a lot of effort. But eventually you can start to change your brain. Now, really what it comes down to, though, is there's going to be struggle. Whenever you do something new, there's always struggle. And there's a chapter, there's a part of my book that's called Embrace the Struggle. And there's many neuroscientists and neurobiologists that actually say this. When you struggle to do something, it is the most important part. When you fail at doing something, it's more important than succeeding. And because what happens is this is it's gonna feel like stress and agitation. If you listen to the last episode I did, it feels like stress and agitation when your brain is focusing. The reason why is cause your brain is releasing acetylcholine and epinephrine, which is another name for adrenaline, inside of your brain. But it releases acetylcholine and epinephrine in order for you to focus. And what's interesting about it is this is when your brain. This is so crazy, when your brain is starting to change itself, it releases epinephrine and acetylcholine at the exact point in your brain that it needs to change. So nowhere else in the brain but the main point, I don't wanna say nowhere else, but the main point that it releases and has acetylcholine and epinephrine release is the point of your brain that it marks that needs to change. Now, the feeling in your body when you release acetylcholine and epinephrine is stress and agitation. And so the stress and agitation is actually showing you that your brain is about to start to change itself. And that's where it's going to mark the neurons that it needs to change. Wow. So what you're telling me, Rob, is that when I struggle to get better at something, it's actually the most important part of changing my brain? Yes, that's what I'm telling you. And the best part about the struggle and the stress of changing your brain is that when you mess something up, it actually makes you better when you mess up something. So if you. If you say, hey, I want to play, you know, the solo from Pink Floyd, you could do that. And if you play it perfectly, your brain doesn't change at all. But if you screw up in the moment that you screw up, your brain releases more acetylcholine and more epinephrine, and so that you can focus more. And so it's really important that when you're trying to change your brain, you want to be able to focus on pushing yourself out of your comfort zone as much as possible. And then here's what's really important about changing your brain, okay? The acetylcholine and the epinephrine are released in the exact place of the neurons that need to change. But the change doesn't happen in that moment. The change occurs when you sleep. That is when your brain reorganizes synaptic connections. And so what you want to really, really focus on is if you're trying to. If you're trying to focus on changing yourself, changing your brain, changing your life. Yes, put dedicated work and show up day in, day out, day in, day out. Put in the fricking work so that it's not just a chemical change, but it turns into a structural change and then eventually turns into a functional change. But if you're going to do this, just as important as putting in the action is, the rest is the sleeping. It's the same way that if you're trying to build muscles, sure, you can definitely build muscles if you want to, but you're going to have to actually get really good sleep. If you've ever tried to work out a lot. Just as important as working out is the sleep. And so you want to make sure that if you're working out and you're putting a lot into actually trying to change your brain, make sure that you're getting enough rest, because that is where the actual synaptic connections change. Oh, my God. How amazing is this? And so that is really how to change your brain through neuroplasticity. That is once again, from my book called Level Up. If you want to buy, you can buy it anywhere. And so I just wanted to share over the past three episodes with you guys, some of the tips and tricks that I've been researching for the past three years that I haven't shared in the podcast. Once again, the book is a step by step process to understand your mind and how to take actions you need to. I always say we're given the most complex piece of machinery in the entire world in between our ears, but we have no manual for how to actually use our brain. I created Level up, which is called Level Up. How to get focused, stop procrastinating, and upgrade your life. I created this to be the manual to understand yourself, to get out of your own way, to stop procrastinating, to stop self sabotaging so you can take action, to create the life that you want so you can buy Level up wherever books are available for you. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.