Our Brains amazing ability to restructure itself (plasticity) also has a dualistic alter ego. This Jekyll and Hyde mechanism on one hand allows for more efficient use of certain pathways (which I’ll show you how to utilise in future articles), but on the other hand, condemns the owner of the brain to live in an unalterable, un-adaptable existence. We all have experienced people that display the negative effects, who won’t or can’t, by virtue of inability or cognitive dissonance, accept reality despite overwhelming evidence.
The way it works is summed up in this phrase ‘Neurons that fire together wire together’, and ‘if you don't use it, you lose it’. When experiencing and interacting with physical reality we do so through the lens of habitual usage of our brain.
To understand the importance of this you need to understand that nothing that you see or hear when you look out of your eyes or listen with your ears exists out there. Everything you perceive is a construction of your mind, made up of three pivotal components: Past learning, physiological mechanisms, and stimulation of your senses.
Use of pathways in the brain, is like walking through a forest, the more often a certain pathway is used, the more deeply and permanently that pathway becomes entrenched. If you have another pathway in the forest that is either rarely or never used, the forest will reclaim that area. The same happens in your brain, if you use specific synapses in detriment to others, the ones that are stimulated remain and become dominant, the unused synapses literally cease to be. The plastic brain becomes rigid.
Humans have capitilised upon this, even before our current understanding of neuroscience, in many ways. One very widespread method is through religion.
I’m sure we’ve all had discussions with devout believers, who can’t accept other interpretations of reality that are in discord to their own. Don’t blame them, this is merely the outcome of a repeated input into a plastic brain. The input has been repeated so often, and usually since childhood, that the brain is wired to perceptually accept only that reality. The Jesuit motto ‘Give me the child until he is seven, and I’ll give you the Man’, embodies this idea.
Your past learning determines much of what you perceive. The semi-humourous phrase ‘I’d give them five minutes’, in reference to a persons ability to survive in a hostile environment, is an appreciation of this. Although I consider myself fairly on the ball with a pretty well functioning visual system, I have grown up in an urban environment in the western world, which skews my perception. If you dropped me in a jungle complete with customary beasties, I would be reliant on my perception shaped by the boundaries and sharp contrasts that I had learned to navigate my environment. Although I probably would be able to identify the amazingly camouflaged animals, it would probably be one second prior to it chowing down on my leg. A local person, growing up in the jungle, would have perceived the animal immediately, and would not have suffered the same fate that I hypothetically endured.
You past learning determines your ability to perceive the world. In the above example, it’s not that the animal didn’t exist, it undoubtedly did, I just couldn’t see it. Unless we free our minds of bad learning from our past, it will continue to cause similar difficulties and limitations on expanding your potential.
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