Neuroplasticity and Growth Mindset
What is Neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the scientific belief that our brains are not hard-wired at birth (which was the common belief traditionally), but are better understood as a malleable plastic, where they change over time based on numerous factors. Harnessing this malleability, it is possible to make our brains increasingly resilient, and strengthen the connections and bonds within our minds.
Our brains are filled with uncountable neurons, each attached to countless others, creating a web of connectivity within our brains; connections that affect how we perceive and understand the world around us. Through strengthening these connections by practicing, einforcing ideas, and even creating new connections through changing the was in which we think about certain topics/challenges, we are reinforcing existing neural pathways into neural highways, greating increasing the speed and breadth of information able to connect our brains. Similarly, by changing the way we think about things, we are creating new pathways, possibly creating shortcuts, or unlocking different perspectives that we previously may never have considered.
Explaining Neuroplasticity through Analogy.
As an analogy, imagine that the way in which we are taught to think in schools and growing up naturally as the age-old roads connecting local towns and villages. Our towns are surrounded by rivers, valleys, and mountains. The age-old roads go around the mountains, follow the valleys, and only cross the rivers at their shallowest points. The way in which we travel from Town A to Town B is set in stone, and takes a fixed time; we see the same sights each time, nothing really changing. However, the more we use the roads, the better they become, the more reinforced they are and the faster we can travel on them. In this way, we can incrementally improve the efficiency of our brains' thinking power.
Harnessing neuroplasticity in this analogical world would be to question why, with all our modern technology, we have to use the hundreds of years old paths. Instead, we tunnel through a mountain, connecting two towns that may have been 2 hours apart originally, but now are 20 minutes apart thanks to our new tunnel pathway. Similarly, creating bridges over deep rivers and investing into more complicated infrastructure, the whole area can become interconnected like never before. Without having to go the old ways, new views are available, changing how we think about each connection in regards to each other.
TIn conclusion, by being mindful of neuroplasticity, we can open our brains up to change, supercharging our minds for problem solving, now being able to look at each problem in new, out of the box ways. Continuous practice makes all connections stronger; by combining regular practice with mixing tasks together, we can both strengthen existing bonds and nurture new paths within our mind.
What is a Growth Mindset?
In simple terms, a "Growth Mindset" is the belief that one can improve their abilities through effort and continuous practice. In essense, the belief that one can grow. The mistake many of us make, or are subjected to, is the belief that to fail something is the end of that journey. To fail a test is the end of that period in our lives. The study we did was not enough, and that's that. This is incredibly damaging to our ability to move forward; feeling that oneself is a failure is just setting oneself up for continued hardship as we will either push ourselves further until we hit our breaking point, or resign ourselves to mediocrity, fearing to dream of greater success lest we let ourselves down again by failing.
Changing our perspective to viewing our continuing development as a journey laid out in front of us, with setbacks being viewed as "Not yet", rather than as "Failure" is a far kinder and supportive way to look at both our own lives and at others around us. Real strength is the perseverence to keep going, to keep developing ourselves so that each successive challenge can be overcome with less difficulty, and more can be learned each time we falter slightly. Learning from mistakes and recontextualising them into learning moments is vital for a continuous sense of forward movement and self-development.
The human mind is an extraordinarily powerful and complex thing. We know from the placebo effect that simply by thinking that something is occuring, our mainds can often begin the transformation process because we believe it is happening. This is easiest to see in the use of placebo drugs, which are simply sugar capsules rather than actual medicine. However, if the patient believes they are taking real medicine, they will often begin the healing process. utilising this concept in simple ways by convincing ourselves of our developmental journey before us is a powerful tool to help defeat defeatism and encourage positive thinking!