Brain plasticity is the fancy term that neuroscientists came up with for the following simple phenomenon: a person’s brain never stops developing structurally and operationally until his/her death. What this means is that you and I can enhance our intellectual abilities by doing things differently in life.

In this essay, I will start by covering the research that led to this discovery. Then, I will move on to practical observations of how brain plasticity and enhanced cognition manifest themselves.

Following this, I will analyse a unique problem posed by our brain known as the “binding problem”. Finally, I will discuss how you could use all of this knowledge to supercharge your intellect. Without any further ado, let us begin.

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How Did We Discover Brain Plasticity?

The human brain presents itself as a very attractive research topic. However, we have ethical and legal issues that stop most researchers from diving into live human brains. So, most of what we know about the human brain comes from people who had damaged critical parts of their brains.

We have had a richer source of knowledge about brain functionality from animals. When I mean animals, it has mostly been rats and a few monkeys. Let us consider one specific experimental research case with rats.

Researchers split a bunch of rats into two groups: One group got to live in “enriched environments” such as a cage with toys, workout equipment, and other rat buddies to play with. The other group got to live in “dull environments” which were by design non-stimulating (boring).

Then, the researchers did tests measuring the learning and spatial memory capabilities of both groups. One such test was the Morris water maze. In this maze, the rats swim in a small, murky pool of water until they find a submerged escape platform.

The “environmentally enriched” rats consistently outperformed the “dull environment” rats. What’s more, researchers figured out that the “environmentally enriched rats” featured a greater number of nerve cell connections (synapses) and increased nerve fibre (dendritic) complexity, specifically in the hippocampus.

This nature/process of the brain to develop complex circuitry via life experiences led scientists to create the term “brain plasticity” for it. Furthermore, it was also observed in other animals such as monkeys, cats, etc.

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How Does Brain Plasticity Apply to Human Beings?

Researchers don’t have the same level of freedom with human beings as they have with rats. So, they are restricted to empirical studies. Neuroscientists found a significant deviation in intellectual capabilities between orphaned infants that were raised in institutions and those that found foster families.

In another well known example (in behavioural neuroscience), London cab drivers enter the picture. Unlike most other cities/countries, the London cab drivers go through intense training for up to three years threading their way through the maze-like streets of the city. When they are ready, they have to clear a very challenging test that requires them to drive from one address to another using the shortest path. They get no GPS or any other form of help!

Just like in the rats, the hippocampus is responsible for spatial learning and memory in human beings as well. It turns out that the London cabbies have a significantly larger hippocampus. Furthermore, seasoned cabbies featured a larger posterior hippocampus as compared to the cabbies with just a few years of experience.

Similar studies have been conducted across the board with fields requiring some sort of cognitive “expertise”. The verdict: empirical research strongly suggests brain plasticity in the human brain.

The Human Intellect

When we talk about supercharging your intellect, we are actually talking about “cognition” — the process you use to attend, identify, and react to external stimuli as well as your own thoughts. As far as cognitive improvement and brain plasticity are concerned, the following brain areas are the most interesting for us:

1. The parietal association areas — responsible for attention to the physical surrounding.

2. The temporal association areas — responsible for interpreting what you observe.

3. The frontal association areas — responsible for appropriate response to stimuli.

Note that these association areas are different from the respective “lobes”. The association areas connect the respective lobes (and other significant areas of the brain) to a central complex network. They are like connection cables that connect the lobes and other parts. We know so much about these parts thanks to unfortunate individuals who damaged these specific regions.

What’s more, only (roughly) 25% of the brain is allocated to encoding incoming information. We use the remaining 75% to transform the incoming signals into a unified experience we call “life”. This directly brings us to a very interesting challenge.

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The Binding Problem

You see, the functions of all of the association areas add up to more than the sum of their parts. Any new incoming piece of information has the potential to be linked to all of the other pieces of information our brain already holds.

All this is fine, but we have a mysterious problem lying underneath this process: we collect input information via various input channels (like sight, smell, etc.), but we experience our world as one single unity.

How is it possible that we are able to “bind” all of these threads of information into one unified life experience dynamically and constantly? Neuroscientists say that this has to do with the association areas we just covered.

When I researched further, I came across several competing theories, but nothing concrete (as far as I could tell). I must also caution you as the reader that this topic leads to an entire sub-genre of pseudo-scientific claims and products (more on that in a bit).

Why the binding problem is of interest to us is the fact that it leads us to an active and interesting field of research about human cognition and cognitive capabilities.

How Not to Supercharge Your Intellect

Before we cover how you could supercharge your intellect, I thought that it makes sense to cover a few pitfalls. The term “brain training” often pops up in the context of games and/or apps that allegedly claim to boost your brain capabilities by solving puzzles and brain-teasers.

I am not diving too much into detail here, but it turns out that most of these claims are not scientifically correct. Some of these developers/business owners have gotten into legal trouble over the issue.

In short, solving a crossword puzzle a day is not going to help you become a magically intelligent person. If you spend ten hours getting good at a puzzle, you brain will get very good at solving that type of puzzle, but your intellectual capabilities would not have necessarily improved. If someone is selling a single product to improve your brain performance, be very sceptical.

Remember what we just learned about the binding problem: It involves complex circuitry that transforms a vast network of stimuli into one seamless experience. Such a complex phenomenon cannot be boosted by a one-shot-fix. Since we are on that topic, let us see what we could actually do about it.

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How to Really Supercharge Your Intellect

It turns out that there are ways to improve your cognitive capabilities. It is just that they don’t come in the form of a convenient product or a pill.

The various association areas take in “rich” environmental stimuli and form new useful connections in the brain. So, the solution is to live a rich and healthy life.

Puzzles could help. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient for cognitive improvement. They could be an added bonus on top of the said rich and healthy lifestyle. Since ‘rich and healthy’ is a subjective term, let me clarify further.

A rich lifestyle aimed at cognitive improvement (or intellectual supercharge) involves a wide array of life experiences and challenges. Seek new adventures, solve new problems, learn new skills, and persist more than giving up.

If you seek to solve a variety of problems (both physical and abstract) from various fields, it is likely to help you improve your intellectual capabilities. Researchers were also able to establish positive correlation between physical exercise and cognitive improvement. We did talk about a rich and healthy lifestyle, after all.

So, there you have it. If you feel underwhelmed with my revelation here, I empathise with you. Everyone (including me) would love to exploit a “secret one-shot-fix”; the magic bullet; the golden elixir. Yet, from my research into this topic, this is the best I could find. If anything, this information at least helps you filter the weed from the crop!

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References: Richard Restak, Bryan Kolb and Ian Q. Whishaw, and George W. Rebok.

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Further reading that might interest you:

• Weber’s Law: Why Earning More Leads To Lesser Satisfaction?
• How To Really Understand Gruen Effect?
• Big Tech Using Big Data For Perfect Prediction/Spying Is A Lie?

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