Priscilla Xu

• What is Plasticity?And When?
• Why do children seem to learn faster?
• Breaking Neuroplasticity Lies from the General Public
• Can human generate new neurons?
• The Kennard Principle
• Awareness Cues Brain to Change
• The Neurochemicals for Plasticity.
  1. Epinephrine Increase your Alertness
  2. ACh acts as a spotlight to focus
  3. Use your emotions and find valuable, personal reasons to do that activity. (Increase dopamine)
• How apply scientific principles to change your brain?
• How to focus? (Increase ACh)
• How long should your focus cycles be?: Ultradian Cycles
• Hearing and Learning
• Real changes of the brain occur in sleep

What is Plasticity?And When?

• Plasticity is the change of brain in response to experience.
• The connections in the the brain competes for limited amount of spaces in between the fixed number of neurons.
• You have to give up connections to make changes. Have to be selective attention
• The brain has a customized map to the outside world.

Why do children seem to learn faster?

• Hard wired vs Plastic brain
  • Young brains can change with passive experience.
  • Developmental plasticity: Before age 2, humans become overly connected.
    • As we mature, humans remove connections that we don’t use, then the used connections are strengthened until 25.
• If you want to change your brain, you have to go through a few specific processes to open the gate to adulthood (roughly after 25 years old)
  • Making more connections stronger or removal connections
• One trial learning: a traumatic experience that changes your nervous system.
• Digestion and heartbeat do not change because it is crucial for survival.

Breaking Neuroplasticity Lies from the General Public

• LIE: All experiences change the brain.
  • Only unless you are a young child.
• 2nd LIE: Wire together and fire together.
  • This is only true before 25 years old.

Can human generate new neurons?

After puberty, the human nervous system barely adds any new neurons in the brain.

Neuron generation can only happen in the hippocampus and olfactory bulb.

The Kennard Principle

• If someone at blind at birth, visual cortex can be replaced with ears.
  • They can sense touch (Braille reading)and sound a lot better.
  • This is why perfect pitch is more common in blind people.
  • If you are blind at a later age (like 30 years old for example), the brain will be unlikely to change.

• Kennard Principle: If you have a brain injury, it is better to have it earlier in life.

We also have an image of people to trust or not.

Awareness Cues Brain to Change

• Recognition and controlling the attention are the first steps

• Self-recognition is telling the prefrontal cortex to produce neuro-chemicals that signal the brain to change when we are conscious of the change.

We have to know what is exactly what to change.

• Some examples of things you want to learn or change are new motor and cognitive skills, removing the emotional load, and grief. experience, building a more excellent range of emotions, new language.

The Neurochemicals for Plasticity.

• After your self-recognition of change, the brain has the potential to engage in long-term potentiation in neuroplastic changes.

Epinephrine Increase your Alertness

• Epinephrine from Locus coeruleus hoses the brain with epinephrine and increases awareness

• Epinephrine wakes up the entire brain for a change.

ACh acts as a spotlight to focus

• Acetylcholine is released from the brain stem in the parabigemintal nucleus and nucleus basalis.

• ACh sends a signal to the thalamus and amplifies the focused signal of the sensory signal you are focusing on.

• With ACh from two sources and epinephrine, you get massive learning (neuroplasticity) in one shot.

Use your emotions and find valuable, personal reasons to do that activity. (Increase dopamine)

• Love, hate, and shame are all the same because they increase alertness and arousal.

• Be aware of positive reinforcements of people saying to you “Oh you will achieve this goal” when you have not even started the goal.
  • We can have a shower of dopamine when we imagine our success.

• You can do things out of love or not feeling ashamed. Those are all powerful motives.

How apply scientific principles to change your brain?

• Master your sleep schedule for good focus and ACh + alertness
• Access your alertness (Increase epinephrine)

• Self-experiment data from Dr.Huberman’s story: Nicotinic ACh receptors in attention and alertness. It brings focus to chewing nicotinic gums when he works. Might offset Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
  • Increases reflexion speed and acuity of brain

How to focus? (Increase ACh)

• Mental focus comes with visual focus laser focus

• We can focus by engaging in vergence eye movement. This means that the distance inter-pupillary distance decreases.

• Our eyes are directly tied to our focus.
  • When our eyes are relaxed, our focus and mind are in an open state. When our eyes are focused on a point, we can increase our focus on the mind.

• Simply bring your visual acuity to a small space and hold your gaze. It will make you focus.

• The brain also decreases the number of blinks during a focused state.

• We want to blink less because blinking resets the brain’s ability to focus. In contrast, we also blink more when we are tired.

How long should your focus cycles be?: Ultradian Cycles

• One Ultradian cycle is around 90 mins.
  • 5-10 minutes warm up for learning
  • You go into the focus and re-anchor your focus with your eyes.

• Let the brain drift after one Ultradian Cycle
  • You can go for a walk
  • Or review the things you have learn when you allow your attention to drift.

• Know when you are the most alert!
  • You will be at an advantage and don’t passively absorb information.
  • Attention is something you can learn to control in an Ultradian cycle.

Hearing and Learning

• You can increase your cone of focus with your ears by closing eyes.
  • Don’t tell them to look at your eyes when you want them to listen.

Real changes of the brain occur in sleep

• The highlighted path will strengthen during deep sleep of the sleep cycles.
• Non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) done after a learning session has been shown that it can increase learning retention
  • – Non-sleep deep rest is a script that one can follow you allow to enter deep relaxation mode.
  • Here’s a link to NSDR if you want to try it out yourself.