Moving from the cab to the cushion, mindfulness meditators have increased gray matter-which means a thicker cortex-in three key regions: prefrontal areas behind the forehead that control attention the insula, which we use for tuning into ourselves and others and the hippocampus. For example, London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s spaghetti snarl of streets have thickened neural layers in their hippocampus, the region that helps make visual-spatial memories like building a muscle, these drivers worked a part of their brain and grew new tissue there. This is what scientists call “experience-dependent neuroplasticity,” which is a hot area of research these days. Day after day, your mind is building your brain.

In the saying in neuroscience: Neurons that fire together, wire together. But intense, prolonged, or repeated mental/neural activity-especially if it is conscious-will leave an enduring imprint in neural structure, like a surging current reshaping a riverbed. Much mental and therefore neural activity flows through the brain like ripples on a river, with no lasting effects on its channel. Meanwhile, less active connections wither away in a process sometimes called neural Darwinism: the survival of the busiest.Īll mental activity-sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings, conscious and unconscious processes-is based on underlying neural activity. Active synapses become more sensitive, new synapses start growing within minutes, busy regions get more blood since they need more oxygen and glucose to do their work, and genes inside neurons turn on or off.

All this incredibly fast, complex, and dynamic neural activity is continually changing your brain.

As you read this, in the five cups of tofu-like tissue inside your head, nested amidst a trillion support cells, 80-100 billion neurons are signaling each other in a network with about half a quadrillion connections called synapses. It still amazes me but it’s true: Whatever we repeatedly sense and feel and want and think is slowly but surely sculpting neural structure. The brain is the organ that learns, so it is designed to be changed by your experiences.

You are growing new neural circuits in your brain. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.īesides feeling good in the moment, this third step will have lasting benefits, for when you take in positive experiences, you are not only growing flowers in your mind.

Neurodharma by rick hanson