How easy is it to change our Habits?

Today we have the important job of working out what neuroplasticity is all about. 50 years ago we thought the adult brain remained the same after reaching maturity. Now since the discovery that in fact our neural networks remain ‘plastic’, which means adaptable, a host of research has opened up fuelled by our desire to thrive and improve rather than just survive. Along with that knowledge, as so often with popular science, has come a host of exaggerations and quick fix claims, that prey on the wishful thinker, and today we’re aiming to sort the facts form the fiction and really understand what can change in our neural networks in adulthood and perhaps even offer some tools to facilitate that.

Who better to discuss this with than developmental neurobiologist turned freelance science writer Moheb Costandi. He writes stories and articles for various popular publications like New Scientist and the Guardian, is often cited from his Neurophilosophy blog, and is the author of the books Neuroplasticity and 50 Human Brain Ideas You Really Need to Know.

Things we discuss in this episode:

00:00 A good psychology teacher

04:30 The controversial history of neuroplasticity

11:46 Longterm potentiation (LTP)

12:41 Stem Cells and the tipping point for neuroplasticity

14:47 What’s the significance of neuro-genesis?

16:00 What actually happens when neurons adapt?

18:00 Electro-chemical neurocommunication at high speed

22:00 Are there neurons all over the body?

23:30 The gut’s enteric nervous system (ENS)

25:00 Calling out spurious false rumours about neuroplasticity

31:40 ‘Awareness of plasticity doesn’t empower us in any way’

33:00 The wellness, self help and new age industries have manipulated neuroplasticity to exploit the public

37:05 Can we use plasticity to reprogram negative habits?

40:30 The bidirectional link between brain and behaviour.

44:00 The longer we have a particular behaviour the stronger those pathways become

47:00 Stress hormones stimulate plasticity. Negative emotions encode memories more strongly.

50:00 Microglia: the brain’s immune cells

53:00 Plasticity even in white matter tracts of myelin

55.00 Mitigating age-related cognitive decline using plasticity

01:01:00 Learning a musical instrument or new language can help mitigate dementia

1:05:00 Are there any limits to how plastic the mind can be?

1:12:00 Are brain computer-interfaces going to cause a plasticity adaptation in the brain?

1:16:00 Technology could cause a lowering of brain function rather than a bionic super race

References:

‘Neuroplasticity’ by Moheb Costandi 

’Neurophilosophy’ Mo’s blog 

Charles Darwin - Dissent of Man 

Santiago Ramone Cahall and Camill Gogi - Nobel prize 

The Raticularists 

Paul Bach-y-Rita 

Longterm potentiation LTP 

Microglia: the brain’s immune cells