The Brain Can Change at Any Age — Plasticity as Hope

Season 1.5 closes with the one line I most want to leave: the brain can change at any age. It was once believed that adult brains were fixed. Neuroscience has repeatedly shown otherwise — neuroplasticity, the continual remaking of neural connections through experience and learning. Circuits used grow stronger; circuits unused grow thin.

The pace of change slows with age, but change itself never ends. This single line has saved me. The boy from Shimonoseki who could not study flew to Canada at eighteen without a word of English and came home four years and eight months later speaking it. Past forty, I learned finance and the mechanics of a listing from zero.

I was not special; the brain is simply built that way. And plasticity is decided by repetitions, not by talent.

Everything in these twenty-four essays — pre-celebration to sustain approach, gratitude to train attention, changing environments, stacking small habits, sleeping well, walking well, laughing well — was design for accumulating repetitions. To anyone who thinks it is too late: your brain is faithfully recording how you used it today.

Tomorrow's self is made of today's repetitions.

What do you work for?