ELAN Blog ~ Week 42, Day 212

“At ninety, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum,” states Norman Doidge, M.D. in The Brain That Changes Itself. “At seventy-eight, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal spectacles.”

If that is not enough to encourage you to become a life long learner, consider this: there is new evidence in the field of neuroscience that our brains are plastic. What does that mean? When we learn we do not merely heap on more information to a pile of knowledge but actually change the structure of our brain. And we increase its capacity to learn! The fact is, your brain has the capability to learn new things and along the way become more capable of learning. Doidge cites Michael Merzenich who has developed many innovations in the field of neuroplasticity. One of which is a company called Posit Science, devoted to helping people preserve their brains as they age and extend their mental lifespans because in Merzenich’s words: “We’ve got to do something about the mental lifespan, to extend it out and into the body’s lifespan.”

Why bother with mental exercises when we can pop a pill instead? That may be the common viewpoint in the marketplace today, but Merzenich feels that such drugs provide only a few months of improvement where mental stimulation exercises have long lasting benefits. He talks more of the value of visualization claiming that imagining you are using your muscles actually strengthens them, and “in some cases, the faster you imagine something, the faster you can do it.”

Do you believe it? Have you ever actively visualized a goal, using mental imagery alongside physical practice? If not, try it and see if flexing the imagination muscle adds some power to your practice. Here is one more example to motivate us, from Doidge:

“When Pablo Casals, the cellist, was ninety-one years old, he was approached by a student who asked, ‘Master, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, ‘Because I am making progress.’”

THIS WEEK think about the plasticity of your brain. What do you do on a daily basis that exercises, stimulates or rejuvenates your gray matter? During the last ELAN Blog series on “Watch Your Language,” we learned the value and power of our thoughts. Doidge backs this up with an amazing claim: “Everything your ‘immaterial’ mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain.“

Believe in your amazing brain and take it out to play!

“Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?” Job 12:12

“I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” Woodrow Wilson, 1856-1924