By K J Foxhall 
Reference reading: NEUROPSYCHOLOGY Summarized: The User’s Guide to the Human Brain: Understanding Neuroscience, Memory, and Neuroplasticity (Psychology Summit Collection), by Devon Kade
Neuroplasticity is its ability to physically reorganise itself, forge new connections, and even change its own structure based on what you do, learn, and experience. As your brain is constantly optimising itself for whatever you use it for the most, it can do some incredibly fun and slightly mind-bending things.
It can literally bulk up specific areas
Just like lifting weights builds your biceps, intense mental workouts physically enlarge specific brain regions. The most famous example is the ‘London Taxi Driver’ study. To get their license, drivers must memorise ‘The Knowledge’, a map of 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks. Brain scans showed that these drivers have a significantly larger hippocampus than the average person.
It repurposes unused ‘real estate’
Your brain hates wasting space. If one sense is lost, the brain will completely rewire that territory for something else. When a person is born blind or loses their sight early, their visual cortex doesn’t just sit idle, it gets hijacked by the other senses. This is why blind individuals often develop intensely heightened hearing or touch. Their brain is using the ‘visual’ hardware to process braille or even navigate using human echolocation (clicking their tongues to hear sound bouncing off objects).
It builds high-speed superhighways for your habits
When you first try to learn a guitar chord or drive a manual car, it feels incredibly clunky because the neural pathway is weak, like a dirt road. However, neuroplasticity has a trick called myelination. As you practice, your brain wraps those specific neural connections in a fatty insulator called myelin. This upgrades the connection from a dirt road to a fiber-optic cable, allowing signals to travel up to 100 times faster. It’s the biological reason why hard things eventually feel completely automatic.
It recruits backup dancers when injured
If a stroke or injury damages a part of the brain that controls movement or speech, neuroplasticity allows the brain to route around the damage. Healthy, undamaged areas of the brain can literally learn to take over the functions of the dead tissue. With the right physical therapy, someone can entirely relearn how to walk or talk using a completely different cluster of neurons.
Fun fact: Neuroplasticity isn’t just for kids. While young brains are incredibly flexible, adult brains continuously produce new neurons (a process called neurogenesis) and build new white matter well into old age, especially when you exercise aerobically or learn challenging new skills.
High-performance learning hacks
If you want to learn faster without the ‘grind,’ you need to align your study habits with how the brain actually functions.
The ‘big three’ strategies
| How it works | Why the brain loves it | |
| Spaced Repetition | Reviewing info at increasing intervals (ie 1 day, 1 week, 1 month). | It hacks the ‘Forgetting Curve’ by reminding the brain of info just as it’s about to slip away. |
| Active Recall | Testing yourself instead of re-reading. | Retrieval is a ‘stress test’ for neurons. It signals to the brain that this info is vital for survival. |
| Interleaving | Mixing different topics or types of problems in one session. | It forces the brain to constantly ‘reset’ and distinguish between different concepts, building deeper understanding. |
Pro-Tips for Maximum Retention
The Feynman Technique: Try to explain a concept to a 10-year-old. If you hit a wall or use ‘jargon,’ you’ve found a gap in your own understanding. This forces elaborative encoding.
The 80/20 Sleep Rule: You might think pulling an all-nighter helps, but without REM sleep, your brain cannot consolidate what you studied. Losing a night of sleep can drop your ability to learn new things by up to 40%.
Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR): Taking a 20-minute ‘brain nap’ or doing a guided meditation after a heavy learning session can accelerate the consolidation process.
The brain consumes about 20% of your body’s energy despite being only 2% of its weight. Learning is metabolically expensive! If you’re feeling ‘brain-fried,’ it’s literally because your brain has exhausted its immediate glucose and neurotransmitter supplies. If you need a steady stream of energy because you have a long day for example, make sure you go for slow release energy foods and drinks as the quick fixes will end in what goes up, must come down.