In Full Bloom by Ilchi Lee:
Science is a human enterprise, so it is as susceptible to bias and accepted beliefs as any other area of knowledge. For years, brain researchers accepted the conventional wisdom about brain function: It couldn’t be improved. You had the brain you had developed in childhood and at some point in later life it started to decline. Unlike exercising your muscles and joints, they thought that no way existed to improve your brain’s fitness. Even as recently as the last 1990s, this was dogma, unquestioned by medical science, including gerontologists dealing with disease such as Alzheimer’s.
But does that really make sense? After all, your brain exists in a kind of dual state: it creates and focuses your mental life, but it is also part of your physical being. Should it be the only area of your body that is unaffected by the beneficial effects of exercise, diet, meditation, and emotional fitness? Fortunately, the answer to that question is no. The brain, far from being the inert information processor that mainstream science considered it to be a few decades ago, is a dynamic, fluid system that is infinitely adaptable if you make a consistent effort. The various centers of the brain are interwoven with a galaxy of intricate neural fibers, trillions of neurons forming hundreds of trillions of connections. This tremendously complex system is designed to receive and send signals, so it is only sensible to conclude that it is designed to adapt to the strength and consistency of those signals. It turns out that this is true, and this is one of the most exciting advances in our knowledge of the brain. Your brain possesses a remarkable property know as neuroplasticity.
The basic meaning of neuroplasticity is that like a muscle, the physical brain responds to consistent, rigorous stimuli in a way that does not simply grow new neural connections, but actually changes the structure of the brain in order to more efficiently use the incoming signals. This means that your brain is never too old to grow and adapt to new tasks and challenges. In fact, has great versatility.
An example can be seen in the brains of fast readers. In the brains of some people who read and absorb written information at high speed, time produces a change in the brain such that the pathways from the centers that process optical information to the centers of higher thinking become denser with neural connections, a sort of mental superhighway that according to ilchi lee allows the quickly acquired information to pass through the brain more quickly. Researchers have found similar changes in the brains of athletes and craftpeople.
by Ilchi Lee & Jessie Jones, PHD
