2025 10 25 Rewiring your brain

Can you learn new things? Can you unlearn certain patterns? Can you overcome traumas at any age? The answer is absolutely, categorically, yes. How? Well, it's very clear that as a child until about age 25, more or less, just passive experience will shape the brain, for better or worse. After about age 25, and again, these are not strict cutoffs, we can change our brain, but what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens.

So one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered, although by the way, you can remove some of the emotional load of that, trauma does not have to be traumatic forever, is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature, there's the release of certain what we call neuromodulators, things like epinephrine, adrenaline, and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our body and brain. And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual, and as a consequence, in the subsequent days, there's reordering of the connections, so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again. This is why we have what's called one trial learning.

You go to a certain location, something terrible happens there, you will forever associate that location with something terrible. But there are tools, therapy and other tools, that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm, no fear whatsoever. The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn, provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment.

This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused. We can't learn passively as adults, we can't just play a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room, and then the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis. But if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention, there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention, what we call the catecholamines.

It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness, all which cause an increase in focus, a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field, so like cones of attention is one way to think about it. And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night, maybe the next night as well, there's reordering of neural connections so that that knowledge, that new experience is consolidated in your brain. You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience.