Your Brain Is More Editable Than You Think
Tejas GK| (7d ago)
I first came across the idea of neuroplasticity through Aliona Yu, the figure skater.
And the more I read about it, the more fascinating it became.
Because neuroplasticity basically tells us something that sounds almost too good to be true:
Your brain is not a finished product.
The brain you have today is not necessarily the brain you'll have five years from now.
The things you repeatedly do, think about, practice, avoid, struggle with, and pay attention to can physically and functionally change your brain.
And that has some pretty insane implications for learning, habits, sports, programming, languages, confidence, rehabilitation, and basically everything involving human behaviour.
So What Exactly Is Neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change and reorganize itself in response to experience.
Your brain contains billions of neurons communicating through enormous networks of connections.
When you repeatedly perform an activity, some of those connections can become stronger and more efficient.
When certain connections aren't used much, they can weaken.
It's a little like walking through a forest.
Imagine there is no path.
The first time you walk through it, you have to push through bushes, move branches and constantly figure out where you're going.
Walk through the exact same route tomorrow and it becomes slightly easier.
Walk through it every day for six months and eventually there's a trail.
That's roughly how I like to think about learning.
The first time you solve a programming problem, everything feels painfully deliberate.
Okay. I need a loop here.
What shouldleftpoint to?
Why am I movingright?
Wait, why does this even work?
After solving enough similar problems, something changes.
You start looking at a problem and thinking:
"This smells like two pointers."
The forest now has a trail.
Your Brain Literally Changes When You Learn
This isn't just motivational self-help language.
Learning can produce measurable changes in the nervous system.
Neural connections can strengthen or weaken. New connections can form. Existing networks can reorganize. With sustained practice, the brain can become more efficient at performing particular tasks.
One famous area of research involves London taxi drivers.
Traditional London cab drivers had to learn an enormous amount of geographical information known as "The Knowledge"—thousands of streets, landmarks and routes.
Research found differences in parts of the hippocampus, a brain region heavily involved in spatial memory, associated with their navigation expertise.
Another fascinating example comes from musicians.
Years of repeatedly coordinating fingers, hearing subtle differences in sound, reading music and maintaining rhythm are associated with differences in brain regions involved in auditory and motor processing.
The brain adapts to what you repeatedly demand from it.
Think About Learning to Drive
Remember the first time you drove a car.
There are an absurd number of things happening simultaneously.
Mirrors.
Steering.
Brakes.
Accelerator.
Gear.
Indicators.
Traffic.
Pedestrians.
The idiot behind you honking 0.3 seconds after the signal turns green.
At first, your conscious attention is overloaded.
You're actively thinking about almost everything.
After enough driving, you can perform many of these actions almost automatically.
You don't consciously narrate:
"Vehicle ahead is slowing. I shall now move my right foot approximately seven centimetres toward the brake pedal."
You just brake.
Your nervous system has become better at executing the behaviour.
Practice has converted something cognitively expensive into something far more efficient.
This Is Why Repetition Matters So Much
There's a common misconception about learning:
"I understood it, therefore I know it."
Unfortunately, understanding something once isn't the same as being able to retrieve and use it.
You can watch someone explain binary search and think:
Yep. Makes perfect sense.
Then somebody gives you an empty editor.
Suddenly:
...
Nothing.
Because recognition isn't mastery.
The brain needs repeated retrieval and application.
This is why solving a problem yourself is dramatically different from watching someone solve it.
It's also why writing code yourself matters.
Why speaking a language matters.
Why actually playing the guitar matters.
Why actually skating matters.
Why actually having difficult conversations matters.
Knowledge becomes useful through repeated execution.
Neuroplasticity and Sports
This is where learning about neuroplasticity through a skater made perfect sense to me.
Imagine learning a complicated skating movement.
Initially, you're consciously thinking about everything:
Where should my foot go?
Where should my weight be?
What should my arms do?
When should I rotate?
Where should I look?
But an elite athlete has performed these movements thousands upon thousands of times.
Eventually the movement becomes deeply trained.
This doesn't mean the athlete stops thinking.
It means their nervous system has become extraordinarily optimized for that particular task.
The same thing happens with:
- basketball shots
- swimming strokes
- tennis serves
- boxing combinations
- dancing
- typing
- playing piano
- driving
Practice isn't merely "remembering."
You're training a biological system.
Neuroplasticity and Programming
This might be my favourite example.
Consider seeing this for the first time:
let left = 0;
let right = arr.length - 1;
while (left < right) {
// ...
}
A beginner sees variables.
Someone who has solved 100 array problems sees a pattern.
They might immediately start thinking:
Sorted array?
Pair sum?
Opposite-direction two pointers?
That's expertise.
Experienced developers aren't necessarily performing dramatically more raw computation every second.
They've developed an enormous library of patterns.
They see:
Repeated database queries
and think:
N+1 problem.
They see:
Multiple services updating the same data
and start thinking:
Race condition?
They see:
Need fast lookup by ID
and think:
Hash map.
The brain compresses repeated experience into patterns.
That's why someone with ten years of genuine experience can sometimes identify a problem in minutes that takes a beginner hours.
Neuroplasticity and Language Learning
Think about hearing Japanese for the first time.
It might sound like:
nananananakanananadeshitanananana
Your brain can't easily identify the boundaries.
Then you learn words.
Suddenly you hear:
ありがとう
Then:
ありがとうございます
Then entire phrases start becoming recognizable.
The audio itself hasn't changed.
Your brain has.
You've trained yourself to detect patterns that were previously meaningless noise.
This also explains why immersion can be powerful.
Your brain receives enormous amounts of repeated input and gradually becomes better at predicting what comes next.
Eventually you stop translating every sentence into English.
You start understanding it directly.
That's a pretty remarkable transformation.
Neuroplasticity Doesn't Mean "You Can Become Anything"
There's an important caveat here.
Neuroplasticity sometimes gets turned into motivational nonsense:
"Your brain can change, therefore there are no limits!"
That's not what the science says.
Genetics matter.
Age matters.
Sleep matters.
Health matters.
Environment matters.
Previous experience matters.
Different people learn at different rates.
And some neurological changes or injuries cannot simply be "thought away."
Plasticity means the nervous system has an ability to adapt.
It doesn't mean humans have unlimited biological flexibility.
The Brain Can Learn Bad Things Too
This might be the most overlooked part.
Neuroplasticity isn't inherently positive.
The brain doesn't ask:
"Is this behaviour good for Tejas?"
It responds to repetition and experience.
If you repeatedly practice playing piano, you become better at piano.
But if you repeatedly respond to boredom by immediately opening Instagram, you're also training something.
Boredom → phone.
Boredom → phone.
Boredom → phone.
Eventually reaching for the phone feels almost automatic.
The same can happen with avoidance.
Imagine you're uncomfortable talking to strangers.
You avoid talking to someone.
Immediately you feel relief.
Your brain learns:
Avoidance → relief.
Next time, avoidance becomes even more attractive.
You accidentally trained yourself.
Which Means Confidence Can Also Be Practised
Suppose someone believes:
"I'm terrible at talking to clients."
They might imagine confidence as a personality trait.
You're either confident or you're not.
But many parts of communication are skills.
You can practise asking better questions.
You can practise explaining ideas clearly.
You can practise disagreeing politely.
You can practise negotiating.
You can practise tolerating awkward silence.
You can practise saying:
"That timeline isn't realistic. Here's what we can deliver instead."
The first few times might feel horrible.
After doing it fifty times, the conversation isn't nearly as intimidating.
Not because you've magically transformed into another person.
You've accumulated evidence and experience.
Your brain now knows:
I've been here before.
Failure Is Actually Training Data
This completely changes how I think about mistakes.
Suppose you're learning DSA and attempt a problem for 45 minutes.
You fail.
Then you study the solution.
It feels like those 45 minutes were wasted.
But they weren't necessarily wasted.
You discovered approaches that don't work.
You encountered a new pattern.
You identified gaps in your understanding.
And if you attempt a similar problem later, your brain has previous information to work with.
The important part is what happens after failure.
Failure + reflection + another attempt is incredibly valuable.
Failure followed by immediately copying the solution every time?
Much less useful.
Sleep Is Part of Learning
Here's another reason grinding endlessly isn't always optimal.
Learning doesn't end when you close your laptop.
Sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation.
During sleep, the brain processes and stabilizes things you've learned.
That's why sometimes you struggle with something for hours, go to sleep, return the next morning and suddenly think:
Wait.
This is obvious.
Your brain wasn't literally solving your JavaScript problem overnight, but memory consolidation and recovery can make the information easier to access and manipulate the next day.
So:
Practice → recovery → practice
can sometimes beat:
Practice → practice → practice → practice → mental death.
Why "Talent" Can Be Misleading
We often see the final version of someone.
An incredible skater.
A brilliant programmer.
Someone speaking five languages.
A pianist effortlessly playing a complicated piece.
And we think:
They're naturally talented.
Sometimes they are.
Natural differences absolutely exist.
But we're also looking at the result of thousands of hours of adaptation.
We're seeing the finished trail through the forest.
We didn't see the first hundred times they struggled through the bushes.
Your Environment Is Quietly Training Your Brain
This might be the biggest practical lesson.
If repeated experiences change behaviour and learning, then your environment matters enormously.
If your environment constantly gives you:
Short videos.
Notifications.
Instant gratification.
Context switching.
Messages every three minutes.
You're repeatedly practising fragmented attention.
But if you regularly spend an uninterrupted hour reading, coding, drawing or studying, you're practising sustained attention.
This doesn't mean TikTok permanently destroys your brain or that reading Dostoevsky magically turns you into Einstein.
It simply means:
Pay attention to what you're repeatedly training yourself to do.
Because repetition compounds.
The 100-Repetition Thought Experiment
I've started thinking about skills using a simple question:
What would happen if I deliberately did this 100 times?
One difficult client conversation?
Terrifying.
100 client conversations?
You're probably considerably better.
One DSA problem?
Not much.
100 carefully studied array problems?
Patterns start appearing everywhere.
One Japanese conversation?
Painful.
100 Japanese conversations?
You're not the same speaker anymore.
One gym session?
Almost nothing.
500 gym sessions?
Different body.
One article?
Probably mediocre.
100 articles?
Different writer.
Humans massively underestimate what repeated exposure does because the improvement from repetition #17 to #18 is almost invisible.
But repetition #1 to #500?
That's a different person.
You Are Always Practising Something
This is probably my favourite conclusion from learning about neuroplasticity.
You're practising even when you don't realize you're practising.
Every time you procrastinate when something becomes difficult, you're practising quitting.
Every time you continue for another ten minutes, you're practising persistence.
Every time you avoid an uncomfortable conversation, you're practising avoidance.
Every time you have one anyway, you're practising discomfort.
Every time you immediately reach for entertainment when you're bored, you're practising needing stimulation.
Every time you sit with boredom and continue working, you're practising attention.
None of these individual moments defines you.
But repeated thousands of times?
They start becoming patterns.
And patterns start looking suspiciously like personality.
The Most Exciting Part
The most exciting thing about neuroplasticity isn't that you can magically become anyone you want.
It's something much more realistic.
You aren't completely stuck with your current abilities.
"I'm bad at maths."
Maybe.
Right now.
"I'm terrible at DSA."
Maybe.
Right now.
"I can't communicate properly."
Maybe.
Right now.
"I can't learn languages."
Maybe.
Right now.
Those statements describe your current state.
They don't necessarily describe your ceiling.
The brain you use to learn something is also being modified by the act of learning it.
That's wild.
Your Brain Is a Work in Progress
Software has versions.
v1.0
v1.1
v2.0
Humans don't have clean releases like that.
But in some sense, we're continuously shipping tiny updates.
Some intentional.
Some accidental.
Some useful.
Some terrible.
And neuroplasticity means those updates accumulate.
So perhaps the better question isn't:
"What kind of person am I?"
Maybe it's:
"What am I repeatedly training myself to become?"
Because somewhere between your habits, failures, practice sessions, conversations, books, workouts, mistakes and thousands of boring repetitions...
your brain is adapting.
Whether you intended it to or not.