cfsmess:

6  principles that remodel your brain:

1. Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it. If you are alert, engaged, motivated, ready for action, the brain releases the neurochemicals necessary to enable brain change. When disengaged, distracted, or doing something without thinking that requires no real effort, your neuroplastic switches are “off.”

2. The harder you try, the more you’re motivated, the more alert you are, and the better (or worse) the potential outcome, the bigger the brain change.

3. Initial changes are temporary. Your brain first records the change, then determines whether it should make the change permanent or not. It only becomes permanent if your brain judges the experience to be fascinating or novel enough or if the behavioral outcome is important, good or bad.

4. The brain is changed by internal mental rehearsal in the same ways and involving precisely the same processes that control changes achieved through interactions with the external world. Your internal representations of things recalled from memory work just fine for progressive brain plasticity-based learning.

5. Every movement of learning provides an opportunity for the brain to stabilize – and reduce the disruptive power of – potentially interfering backgrounds or “noise.” Each time your brain strengthens a connection to advance your skill, it also weakens other connections of neurons that weren’t used at that moment. This negative plastic brain change erases some of the irrelevant or interfering activity in the brain.

6. Brain plasticity is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones. You have a “use it or lose it” brain. It’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things.