Review: So How Plastic is Your Brain Really?

New research show that we can birth new brain cells into advanced adulthood

I was stimulated to write this article by new research that finally proves that we can generate new neurons in adult brains.

I have been talking, teaching, and training on all things the brain for nigh on 15 years now — and one thing that fascinates audiences is the idea that our brain is continually plastic i.e. it grows and develops according to usage. This also generates attention-generating headlines in the media such as “meditation grows the brain” or “reading grows the brain” or “gaming changes the brain of teenagers”.

The thing is, we seem to have this inbuilt concept of the brain being static and not growing or changing unlike our bodies: you have a good brain or a bad brain and that’s it for life.

Not so, I constantly tell people — and actually this shouldn’t be a surprise. It shouldn’t be a surprise because like the rest of our body the brain is a biological system — pretty obvious, right. And biological systems adapt to their environment — to a degree. Train our muscles and they get bigger, use different brain pathways and this makes them more efficient and also bigger.