Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today we're talking about neural plasticity, which is this incredible feature of our nervous systems that allows it to change in response to experience.
Neuroplasticity is arguably one of the most important aspects of our biology.
It holds the promise for each and all of us to think differently, to learn new things, to forget painful experiences, and to essentially adapt to anything that life brings us by becoming better.
So let's get started.
Most people are familiar with the word neural plasticity, which is the brain and nervous system's ability to change itself.
All of us were born with a nervous system that isn't just capable of change, but was designed to change.
When we enter the world, our nervous system is primed for learning.
The brain and nervous system of a baby is wired very crudely.
The connections are not precise.
And we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies are kind of flopping there like a kind of a little potato bug with limbs.
They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement.
They certainly can't speak, and they can't really do anything with precision.
So I want you to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing.
And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or other caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learn, through the places you traveled or didn't travel, your nervous system became customized to your unique experience.
Now, that's true for certain parts of your brain that are involved in what we call representations of the outside world.
A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world or represent the auditory world, or represent the gallery of smells that are possible in the world.
However, there are aspects of your nervous system that were designed not to be plastic.
They were wired.