Article: Can you rewire your brain? – Aeon

Chandelier

Chandelier

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What the metaphor of ‘rewiring’ gets wrong about neuroplasticity | Aeon Essays

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board
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Can you rewire your brain?​

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board​

by Peter Lukacs – BIO
Peter Lukacs is a retired neurologist with postdoctoral Hungarian board certification in neurology. His writing focuses on neuroscience, clinical medicine, and the philosophical implications of scientific progress. He brings a clinician’s perspective to questions of mind, perception, and modern technology.


4000-word essay.
The forum rules are to not provide AI summaries for longer essays, Hence, I leave the summarization of interesting parts to members who are less crash-prone to focused reading than I am – thank you in advance!
 
The document provides the option of listening to the essay which I have just done.
The writer explains with examples that neuroplasticity is a real phenomenon of the brain adapting connections between neurons as the person practices new learning. It's particularly relevant clinically to stroke rehabilitation where some stoke sufferers are able to relearn skills like speech and movement by repetition and undamaged parts of the brain adapting. He also warns that it's not a simple process and not always possible to retrain the brain and not applicable to all situations.

It involves changes at the cellular level and can occur in response to learning, memory, sensory input and trauma. Importantly, while neuroplasticity is a lifelong feature of the brain, it is more robust during youth and becomes more effort-dependent with age.

This capacity allows the brain to adapt to new experiences, recover from injuries, learn new information and compensate for lost functions. Neuroplasticity is real, but it’s not magic. It has limits. It requires effort. And it doesn’t always result in perfect recovery or transformation.
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Metaphors can motivate, but they can also mislead. The notion that someone can rewire their brain through sheer willpower, self-help books or 10 minutes of daily meditation risks turning serious neurological change into a gimmick.
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Metaphors can motivate, but they can also mislead. The notion that someone can rewire their brain through sheer willpower, self-help books or 10 minutes of daily meditation risks turning serious neurological change into a gimmick.
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Risks, future tense? Oh, you sweet, summer child. This stuff is promoted all over the place by MDs, by neurologists, it's been elevated to full legitimacy. This is literally what is hailed as the future of medicine, it seems to have totally captured the profession. There is no potential for risk, we're not even at the legitimizing phase, we are way into consolidation and standardization. It's not that the profession has given up trying, we are seeing the consequences of having given up a long time ago.

So typical of overly-conservative systems to obsess over imaginary threats while completely ignoring real ones. Long Covid was the easiest test of this, and somehow the entire infrastructure of health care and medicine managed a perfect grade of 0.
 
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