Neuroplasticity Some 15 years ago, if you showed me a diagra | Alter Ego

Neuroplasticity

Some 15 years ago, if you showed me a diagram of my brain with certain areas more active than the others, I’d readily agree that it’s me, that’s who I am. If I have higher activity in areas responsible for anxiety or depression, that’s how it is; some people are more inclined to those things than the others. It’s not the case today, however. We have discovered the notion of neuroplasticity – an idea that our brains adapt to the way we use them.

Think of your brains as a normal muscle. When you use your muscles regularly, and in a specific fashion, they become more adapted to that kind of activity. Same applies to our brains. Recent research done on London taxi drivers confirms this theory.

London is a particularly tricky city to navigate. So, to become a taxi driver, one has to learn the entire city map by heart, and I tell you, that is far from an easy task. Thus, when the researchers took brain scans of London taxi drivers, they saw that regions responsible for spatial orientation and memory showed higher than usual activity. Those taxi drivers trained their brains to adapt to the difficult task of navigating in London.

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