Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a adult brain was set like a fly in amber, struggling to change. Today, we realize our brains and nervous systems switch throughout our lifetimes. This idea of neuroplasticity provides captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement — and provides influenced countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious ‘human brain training’ games and apps. Within this publication, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and participating summary of neuroplasticity for the about Neuroplasticity general listener, explaining how our brains transformation continuously in response to your actions and experiences.

Costandi discusses key experimental findings, and describes how our thinking about the human brain has evolved as time passes. He explains the way the human brain changes during development, and the ‘synaptic pruning’ that occurs before brain maturity. He shows that adult brains can develop new cells (citing, among many other research, research showing that sexually older male canaries learn a new music each year). He identifies the type of mind training that may result in improvement in mind function. It isn’t gadgets and video games that promise to ‘rewire your mind’ but such sustained cognitive jobs as learning a drum or a fresh vocabulary. (Costandi also notes that London cabbies increase their gray matter after rigorous trained in their city’s complicated roads.) He tells how brains compensate after heart stroke or injury; represents addiction and discomfort as maladaptive types of neuroplasticity; and considers human brain changes that accompany childhood, adolescence, parenthood, and ageing. Each of our brains is usually custom-built. Neuroplasticity reaches the center of why is us human.