DIY Brain Surgery and Neuroplasticity

You can physically rewire your brain. Want more capability in some area? You can wire yourself that way. You can repurpose areas of the brain to perform different functions. You can dedicate more neurons and interconnections to specific skills. You can build the brain you want.

Before you get carried away, put away the Dremel tool and dental pick; there’s an easier way to do brain surgery. No tools required.

Until recently, it was believed that brain capacity and internal “wiring” were fixed from birth. That is, certain localized areas of the brain were specialized to perform certain functions according to a fixed map. One patch of cortical real estate was devoted to processing visual input, another to taste, and so on. This also meant that the capacity for whatever abilities and intelligence you were born with were largely fixed and that no additional training or development would get you past some fixed maximum.

Fortunately for us and the rest of the race, it turns out that isn’t true.

Instead, the human brain is wonderfully plastic—so much so that researchers have been able to teach a blind man to see with his tongue.^[48] They took a video camera chip and wired its output to the patient’s tongue in a small 16x16-pixel arrangement. His brain circuits rearranged themselves to perform visual processing based on the neural input from his tongue, and the patient was able to see well enough to drive around cones in a parking lot! Also notice that the input device isn’t particularly high resolution: a mere 256 pixels. But the brain fills in enough details that even this sort of low-res input is enough.

Neuroplasticity (the plastic nature of the brain) also means that the maximum amount you can learn, or the number of skills you attain, is not fixed. There is no upper limit—as long as you believe that. According to Stanford University research psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success [Dwe08], students who believed they could not increase their intelligence in fact couldn’t. Those who believed in the plasticity of their brains increased their abilities easily.

In either case, what you think about the brain’s capacities physically affects the “wiring” of the brain itself. That’s a pretty profound observation. Just thinking that your brain has more capacity for learning makes it so.

Thinking makes it so.

It’s do-it-yourself brain surgery.

Cortical competition

And it’s not just your beliefs that can rewire your brain; there is always an ongoing competition for cortical real estate in your brain.

Skills and abilities that you constantly use and constantly practice will begin to dominate, and more of your brain will become wired for those purposes.

At the same time, lesser-used skills will lose ground. “Use it or lose it” is perfectly accurate in this case, because your brain will dedicate more resources to whatever you are doing the most.

Perhaps this is why musicians practice scales incessantly; it’s sort of like refreshing dynamic RAM. Want to be a better coder? Practice coding more. Engage in deliberate, focused practice as described in the sidebar ​Ten Years to Expertise?​. Want to learn a foreign language? Immerse yourself in it. Speak it all the time. Think in it. Your brain will soon catch on and adapt itself to better facilitate this new usage.