'How I rewired my brain in six weeks' - BBC News

Modern life, school, work, holidays, inflation, remember your lines, scientists are carrying out pioneering research, everything is fine, everything, our

brain

s never evolved for any of this and yet here we are still We move forward as best we can and that's it. thanks to our

brain

incredible ability to adapt to learn to grow I am on a journey to understand the miraculous plasticity of the human brain the brain will even change its structure the nucleus the architecture of the brain can change this is neuroplasticity that was once thought to be limited to youth, we now know that it is a constant force in shaping who we are.

Your mind can change the very substrate of its own operations, helping us learn adaptability. This is one of the most remarkable aspects of human intelligence and I believe plasticity is the mechanism. behind and to heal well, neuroplasticity is actually the core of neurorehabilitation, an active field of study that helps us understand how we become ourselves. As things progress, we will see more and more to what extent our motor ability is actually tied up. to the way we think and feel and I want to know if there is anything we can do to harness or increase neuroplasticity in our daily lives.

On this journey, I'll give you three tricks to help strengthen crucial connections and keep our minds younger in the process as a science journalist I've always been fascinated by how the mind works and today I've come to Royal Holloway University of London to scan my brain before embarking on a six-week course in brain alteration. I'm just taking a moment. To take this stance, I am Thorston Barnhofer, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Sari University. He is currently conducting a study on the effects of mindfulness on managing stress and difficult emotions. He has also been researching how mindfulness changes the actual structure of the brain itself, showing signs of this neuroplastic rewiring even after just a few

weeks

, and what makes mindfulness especially impactful is that by reducing stress it allows it to still occur. more plasticity, but will it work in my brain?

We are about to enter the fmri scanner to see what my brain looks like. From the inside, I'm having a brain scan before and after a period of doing just 30 minutes of meditation a day. Hi Melissa how are you? Okay, so all you need to do is relax, try to stay still, and watch the fixation. It crosses well and will last about 15 minutes, so that's a long time, but what exactly is neuroplasticity? Plasticity is the brain's ability to change according to the stimuli given to it. These are the basis for learning a memory. It's really dynamic. process that involves the whole brain and something else really fascinating that we have learned recently, the brain will even change its structure, our brain is built from a billion neurons and when neurons activate together they are called wi, together they are they become stronger and the connection between them becomes stronger, these can change and change much more in the first years of life than as we age, of course they are still modifiable later and that is really what we call brain plasticity, the capacity of the brain.

The brain continues to reorganize throughout life, that affects the functional networks of the brain and a functional change will be which areas of the brain are connected to which areas. There is also a structural part of plasticity. Mainly changes in how the areas are organized. the brain, whether the areas are more dense or less dense, neuroplasticity is actually the mechanism through which the brain repairs itself and there are now many ways to tighten and increase plasticity in patients with neurological disorders, so neuroplasticity, the brain responding to change, actually takes place. all the time, but we also have the power to influence this to some extent and there are good reasons to want to push it.

More and more studies suggest that it may play a role in delaying degenerative diseases such as dementia. It can also help us rewire the brain after psychological trauma. meaning that the trauma itself is not permanent. Back in the scanner, they show me a series of numbers and ask me to remember the previous number to test my working memory. There will be other processes underneath the working memory process that will become interesting. Then the mind will wander. This happens and if the mind wanders or gets close to it, there will be a certain brain system that becomes more active.

Mind wondering is something that, of course, could be useful, in many ways, it could help us with creativity, but it is also something that can go away and this is where repetitive thinking comes in, where reflective thinking comes in, where worry comes in. and, um, those are the factors that increase stress. Stress hormones, for example, cortisol, will increase and if cortisol levels remain high, um, that can actually become. toxic to your brain for regions of your brain that are very plastic, this shows that stress, among many other things, is a direct inhibitor of neuroplasticity, so as part of my first brain hack, I am training myself to manage stress through mindfulness for the next 6

weeks

.

I'm going to spend time learning to be as aware of the present moment as possible and see what impact this has on my brain, so what mindfulness does is it can buffer stress, you become aware of challenges, those responses more active women, a trend. By worrying, we cannot eliminate the pain of any stressful situation, but there is a feeling that we can choose what the next step is, so the first step within this is to say yes, let's come back from this complexity. to something that is relatively simple and stay with that, so finding this point where the breath is most vivid to you and then following the breath in and out of the body already makes me feel calmer, but my mind was the idea of ​​not leaving it. your mind wanders, um, so I was thinking, oh, I need to send that email, I need to do this, and I said, okay, no, how interesting is breathing, that's a really interesting observation, um, so, first of all Instead, we can actually feel that like I'm doing this.

I come to this with the intention of staying with the breath, to keep my attention on the breath and, in fact, what happens, this is just what the Mind does, it will shut down and tell you about the workings of the mind. that's something that's relevant so we can just go and say Oh, that's what it is, we go back, we go back to the breath, we go back to the breath, so we do two things at the same time, if you want, we are strengthening our muscle to paying attention to staying in the breath and we are cultivating our ability to become more flexible in our attention again.

We are also getting insight into the workings of the mind because we are realizing that this has emerged after 6 weeks. of meditation kindly Guided by Thorston I felt much calmer, but this feeling would manifest as a physical change in my brain. We'll see after another brain scan. I went to South University to discover that it is very exciting to see my brain. the screen that is your brain yes, do you see any results in my brain? yes of course we see changes uh in the brain it's alive it always changes I'm alive that's a good sign that's a good sign and we have some interesting uh uh changes that align with what we see in the literature.

I am a sample of only one of course, yes exactly, so we must be cautious of all those who are scientifically minded, they would not forgive us, so what have they found? I looked at the amydala um which is in light blue, one of each in each hemisphere and they are very important for emotional processing and we see changes in that particular region. Do you see changes? Yes, yes, it's amazing, yes, the trip, uh, amydala, uh, it reduces in volume. and that's what you would expect as a stress reduction effect, so it gets bigger the more stressed we are, it increases in people who suffer from depression or anxiety disorders and with mindfulness training we see it reduce in volume and there's a hint of that in your data and at first I wasn't very stressed, but we still see a little bit of a decline, which I think is pretty exciting, yeah, but that wasn't the only change you saw.

He also found changes in my posterior singular cortex. a region involved in the control of mind wandering and rumination, what was interesting to us was that we see an increase in the posterior region of this and, yes, in the darker blue, it is part of a broader distributed network in the brain that refers As the default mode, Network, the system connects when our mind wanders and of course that is something very central to meditation and we have seen in previous studies changes in this region and that is exactly what we found in your data. Also a small change in that direction increased or decreased in size.

It increased in size, which should be an indication of greater control. So literally just by being aware I managed to increase a part of my brain that prevents my mind from wondering too. A lot of plasticity means there's a constant flow, so we imagine constant input is needed, so it sounds like I need to keep meditating and see you again in a year and then we'll look at some really important things that we would recommend. Yes that's how it is. It's amazing to think that after just 6 weeks of meditation there was a visible change in my brain and that through repeated practice I was able to further increase neuroplasticity by reducing stress.

That said I realized that not all of us have access to metaphorical Sicilian mountain landscapes to meditate and In real life, gaining this extra time can be complicated minute by minute, so in the following episodes we will look for other ways to take advantage and increase plasticity.