# Neuroplasticity Explained - Rewire Your Brain to Learn Anything Faster

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Justin Sung
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whlrIqXcTKo
- **Дата:** 08.11.2025
- **Длительность:** 44:48
- **Просмотры:** 263,838
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15422

## Описание

Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-neuroplasticityexplained

In this video, I will teach you how to rewire your brain to learn faster and better using a scientific phenomenon called Neuroplasticity.

Take my Learning Diagnostic Quiz (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/diagnostic-neuroplasticityexplained

=== Guided Training Program ===
I’ve distilled my 14 years of experience as a learning coach into a step-by-step learning skills program. 

If you want to be able to master new knowledge and skills in half the time, check out: https://go.icanstudy.com/program-neuroplasticityexplained

=== About Dr Justin Sung ===
Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide t

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Let's say you've got a lot of complex stuff to learn in a very short amount of time. It can feel overwhelming, but there's a very high chance that the reason it feels overwhelming is because your brain is stuck in patterns of learning that are actually making it harder than it needs to be. And I know this because I've seen this in thousands of students and professionals who spend more than enough hours learning, but they still struggle. And in fact, across my 13 plus years of being a learning coach, this is one of the most common issues that I see. But the good news is that you can change these neural patterns. You can literally rewire the way your brain learns to make it faster and better at learning. And it's because of this phenomenon called neuroplasticity. So in this video, I'm going to teach you what neuroplasticity is and how you can leverage this to make your brain a more efficient learning machine. So to start with, what actually is neuroplasticity? In short, neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to change and adapt. So the entire concept that you can get better at things, that you can learn new skills, that's because of neuroplasticity. It's the idea that your brain is not this fixed static thing, which seems obvious, but actually wasn't so obvious pretty recently. We used to think that you go through childhood, your brain develops, and then when you become an adult, it's pretty fixed. And that's your intelligence. That's how smart you are. That's how good you are at learning. If there are some topics and subjects that you're better at, then those are your natural strengths and that's sort of how it's going to be for the rest of your life. But that's completely not true. While there are certain preferences and certain habits and certain processes that you are going to be better at either because of your genetics or because of your childhood experiences. The brain is surprisingly very malleable and can learn to be good at a lot of things even if you start off being terrible at them. learning being one of those things. And if you have found yourself in a situation where you have a lot to learn and you feel like you cannot keep compensating for this just by spending more time learning, then this is really important because it means that there is an alternative pathway here which is instead of just compensating, you can actually just upgrade the way that your brain learns. So in the same amount of time, you can cover more content or the same amount of content to a deeper level. And for most learners, this should be a really top priority because the benefit you get from retraining your brain and making it a more efficient learning machine is lifelong. But there are some requirements that have to be met to make your brain undergo this neuroplastic change a little bit more quickly because you probably don't want to be spending the next 15 years of your life waiting for your brain to slowly upgrade. But before I teach you how to do that more quickly, we actually first need to understand why our brain isn't wired to learn that efficiently to begin with. Because those very reasons are probably going to be the same reasons that hold you back from trying to rewire your brain. And to understand that, we need to go back to what the brain was actually well adapted to do in the first place. So let's say that this is a person with an enormously large head. And this is the brain inside here. This brain is very well adapted to do a few things. It's really good at looking at patterns. learning things that are practical. And socially from other people, especially if that thing that you're learning is really practical. And it's good at all of these things because help with survival. If you can see the pattern of a tiger's face in the bush, you're likely going to survive. Learning is a very practical thing that your brain is really good at doing. It's not really good at passing an exam. So if we take this brain which is geared to do this type of learning really well and then you tell it that you need to learn this really high volume of information in a really short amount of time to a very high level of detail when it doesn't really seem practical uh or relevant for your daily life. And even though technically there are patterns that you can see, you only start to see those patterns when you've learned a lot about the topic. So in the beginning, those patterns are not at all obvious. And then you're going to be examined on this at a extremely high level of detail with a really high level of retention that you need on this seemingly irrelevant, highly detailed information. You can see that what we're asking our brain to do is not what it was kind of built to do. To combat this, we figure out methods and strategies of dealing with the artificial modern needs of learning. So we start doing things like wrote memorization. We use methods of learning that are very repetitive. We write a whole lot of notes, lots and lots of notes. And usually we

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

do that repetitively. And we do this, we use these methods for years. And these then become habits of learning. And then when we think about learning, we no longer think about this stuff which your brain is really good at. We think about this stuff. We think about the methods and the habits that we built up. And over time we assume that these habits, this is what learning is. But that is absolutely not true. And this is why when I coach someone, the first thing that they have to understand is that the way you are used to learning, the way that is comfortable for you, the way that you have been learning for years, and probably the way that all of your friends have been learning for years, that is not the way you should be learning. That is the way you have been forced to figure out how to survive in the system and get by. And it's actually really interesting because when I work with a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs and CEOs, sometimes they weren't very good academically, but they can be extremely good learners, very effective learners because they were so bad academically and at school that they actually rejected these methods. These methods were so bad for them that they never turned them into habits and instead they had to examine how their brain prefers to learn from a blank slate. And so the methods and strategies that they ended up coming up with were actually more cognitively aligned for their brain. And I even see the opposite thing. I work with PhD candidates who have been academically excellent their entire life and then when it comes to hitting a ceiling on their current methods and needing to upgrade that, they find it very challenging to change their methods because those habits are so ingrained. And in these instances, those learners have engaged in neuroplasticity a lot. Their brain has changed and adapted and it's molded itself to be really efficient at this thing. It's just that the thing it got really good at is just this stuff. And these are not processes that are conducive to effective learning in the brain. And so if you're in this position now where you've got this existing set of methods and processes of learning that you were really used to and you've been using that for years and now suddenly you feel like you're getting progressively overwhelmed. There's too much to learn. There's not enough time. But the way you're trying to learn feels like how you've always been learning. It's what's comfortable to you. It should be working, but it's not. If that's happening, then that's a sign that you need to actually retrain and rewire the brain because you have hit the limit of performance and result that you can reach when you keep learning with those patterns of thinking. So the question is what are the good patterns of thinking? What are those processes and patterns and habits that are conducive to really effective learning? Good question. Glad I asked. Uh 20 years ago, no one would have been able to tell you this is how learning works because the research wasn't really there. But over the last 20 years of research, we have learned a lot about how learning works. And so while we don't know absolutely everything, there are certain principles that we know must be met. If you do not meet these certain processes and principles, the quality of your learning is not going to be high. So first of all, we know that memory is a symptom. It is not that people have a good memory or have a poor memory. It is that the processes you use may lead to a good memory whereas sometimes poor memory. We also know that cognitive processes are much more important than physical processes. So it doesn't matter if the way you write notes looks this way versus the way you read looks this way. What matters is what goes on inside your brain when you consume that information. Once that information enters your eyes, enters your ears, and gets inside your brain, what do you do with that? What thoughts do you have about this information? Those are the processes that dictate how good your retention is going to be and how good your depth of understanding is going to be. And we know that more integrative processes, this is what I often talk about as higher order learning are vastly superior to isolated processes. So when that information comes into your brain, if you think about that in a way that's relating it to a big picture, looking for patterns, seeing how it connects, looking for relevance and ways to make it relevant, those thoughts, even if you don't get to a clear answer at the end of those thoughts, the thinking in itself builds a stronger memory and deepens your understanding. And hopefully you should see a trend

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

here, which is that these effective methods more closely mirror the type of thinking that your brain is well adapted to do. You're looking for patterns in the information. You're trying to make it more practical and more relevant. Even if it doesn't seem relevant to begin with, but even though this is more effective, most people do not use these methods. Part of it is because it's uncomfortable. It's new, new set of habits. They're not used to doing that because of everything that I talked about here. But the other reason is because we also know that this type of thinking involves more effort. And effort is a good thing. Effective active learning takes more mental effort, which makes sense because your brain is doing all of this integrative thinking behind the scenes. The problem is that a lot of people see this effort, they feel this effort, and then they think that because learning is feeling harder and more effortful, it's less effective for them. And therefore, they actually stop using the methods that would help them the most. Never underestimate a human being's tendency to take the laziest, easiest shortcut. And for learning, it's exactly the same. Now, obviously, this is a gross oversimplification. There's lots more complexity around learning than this. But even with just these four points, you can form a mental checklist about whether a technique is going to be effective or not. If you appreciate that memory is a symptom, then you should understand that you should be thinking about the processes and trying to vary the processes. That becomes one checklist. You should be doing lots of thinking inside your brain which is integrative. So you should be doing integrative thinking and it should take a reasonable amount of effort and it should be mentally engaging. So let's take a technique like reading and rereading something. Are you focusing on the process of learning that you're using? Not really. You're just doing the same thing over and over again hoping that it leads to a different result. So there's an X here. When you read that stuff, are you doing complex engaged thinking mentally with what you read? Not really. You're hoping that when those words enter your eyeballs, somehow that's going to translate into memory with enough repetition. So, big X there. And how difficult, how much effort, how engaging is it? Not very because if it was, you probably wouldn't be falling asleep every time you do this. So, big X on that, too. Now let's contrast this with another technique which is very popular and genuinely pretty effective which is to teach someone else what you've learned. So the very fact that you are trying to use a different process to consolidate your learning that's good. You are also having to recall what you've learned bring it together figure out a logical way to teach someone else and actually generate that teaching. That's good. And if you've ever tried teaching, it's a lot harder than just passively reading something. So on this one, that's also a tick. This is why the idea of teaching to a 10year-old is especially effective because it takes this integrative thinking part and it increases the amount of effort and engagement. Because if you're teaching it to a 10-year-old, you have to not only organize your thoughts, create a flow that's logical and intuitive and makes sense, but then you have to simplify it. So you have to evaluate how well you understand this thing to make something that is simple and accurate and comprehensive. That is very difficult and very mentally engaging. And a person who is wired to learn really effectively naturally leans towards using methods and strategies that promote this kind of thinking. Whereas the person whose habits and comfortable strategies of learning are generally like this, not very integrative. They're more just doing the same technique over and over again and thinking about information in isolation, usually not involving much effort. When you've been doing this for years, these people will have brains that have become wired to find learning more difficult. And so the way that you go from a brain that is not wired effectively to becoming wired more efficiently is to understand what these processes are, the ones that you should be doing and slowly practice them. You immerse yourself in these patterns of thinking and over time your brain adopts this neuroplastic change and will slowly rewire and mold itself. At least that is the big picture. But like I mentioned before, there are certain requirements that have to be met. It's not as simple as saying, "Hey, just start learning like this and everything's going to change for you magically. " There's actually certain conditions that you need to meet in order to make neuroplasticity work for you more effectively. Otherwise, like I said, it's going to take you years and years. Now, I will quickly mention that these requirements for neuroplastic change, there are eight of

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

these core requirements and I'm going to go through them fairly quickly in this video because I don't want this to become a 6hour video. But if for any of these you want to go a little bit more in depth, one good place that you can find that information is in my free weekly newsletter. I go through some of these things with a bit more examples, some more walkthroughs in some of those newsletters and it can give you a few more ideas in terms of how you can implement these requirements for neuroplastic change. So, uh, if you'd like to join that, it's totally free. Uh, each newsletter takes a few minutes to read. I'll leave a link to that in the description down below if you'd like to join. So, starting with the first requirement for rapid neuroplastic change, which is intention. Now, it's going to be a lot easier for me to explain intention and all the other principles if you can sort of visualize what's actually happening physically in your brain with the neurons. So, I'll just draw this quick diagram here. This thing here, this is called an axon. It's like a highway for the electrical signals in your brain. So, when you have thoughts, uh, they're going up and down this highway and it terminates at this area called a syninnapse. The syninnapse is the connection between two neurons. So this here is neuron number one and two. Okay? And this is another axon. So if you have a thought, what's going to happen is that it's going to travel down here and it's going to cross this connection, this syninnapse, and then it's going to travel down this axon as well. And so your brain is made up of billions or actually maybe trillions, hundreds of trillions of these synapses and these connections. and they form this extremely dense intricate network and that is pretty much your brain. And so let's say we kind of zoom out from this view. Uh and it looks like this. So we've got these different brain connections. So each of these lines is an axon and each of these little circles here that's a synapse. So it's a connection between two different neurons. Now when your brain is doing a certain type of thinking and especially when there's patterns of thinking it's using certain pathways. So one pattern of thinking might look like this. You'd start from here, you go down here. Uh maybe you come like that and that becomes a pathway. Another pathway might be that you know start over here and then you know you come down you go back up over to here. So that would be another pathway. And the idea is that the pathways that are used more frequently are the ones that get reinforced and strengthened over time. So the idea with this first requirement, which is intention, is that when you deliberately intend to think in a certain way and you try to use a certain pattern of thinking, it's more effective at activating those specific pathways. This is fairly obvious. Like if you're just kind of randomly thinking about things, not very intentionally, maybe your brain is doing this sometimes, maybe it's doing that. It's going to be a mix of all of those things. The intention basically means that we want to be very clear about how we are thinking and very purposeful so that we try to use the pathways that we know are more beneficial and therefore it means that they're more likely to be activated and strengthened over time. This is the reason why I spent time talking about all these different prerequisites and requirements for effective learning. You have to understand what effective learning actually looks like at a process level so that you can be intentional with how you think. It's not good enough for me to say use this technique and you will be a good learner. It doesn't work that way. Even if you know the technique, you have to understand how it's meant to make you think cognitively. And that intention is what drives that neuroplastic change. Well, is one of the eight things that drive the neuroplastic change. The second point is intensity. Let's say you've now learned about these effective methods and processes of thinking and learning and you've watched some my other videos taking my course. Maybe you've learned about these things and so you give it a go. You sit down with your material. You're about to study. You read a few lines and you try to draw a mind map for like five minutes. you're not going to really get any neuroplastic change because the intensity of that stimulus wasn't enough. It's kind of like going to a gym, lifting up a weight for one rep, and being like, "Am I stronger yet? " No, not even a little bit. The threshold that you need to reach in terms of intensity for that neuroplastic change to actually kick in is sometimes actually fairly high. And a simple rule of thumb that I recommend is that you should calibrate the intensity so that it's always challenging. When you're learning a new skill, if you want to

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

improve at that skill, get better at it, get used to that skill, you should practice in a way where you feel challenged. You don't get good at something by getting to perfection at an easy level. You get good at something by getting good enough at a certain level and then moving on to the next level where you're rechallenged. So if you uh let's say that being really good at this kind of learning is a 10 out of 10, right? You can do all of these processes really well. That's a 10 out of 10. Let's say that one out of 10 is that everything you do is you know very isolated. You're a very passive learner. Uh probably you know memory not very good struggling with learning a lot. So challenging for you if you are at 1 out of 10 maybe just to get to a 2 out of 10 or a 3 out of 10. At this point all of your problems with learning are not being solved. You do not have phenomenal memory. It is a little bit better than it was before. There is incremental bits of progress that's being made and to achieve that is challenging and it's effortful and after a while it's not going to be effortful and at that point maybe you're at a 3 out of 10 and now your next step is a 5 out of 10. Obviously, if you're starting from a 5 out of 10, then your next step is going to be a 7 out of 10. You don't need to stay at 5 out of 10 or aim for a 3 out of 10 like everyone else. And so, this is really important for learning because your own sense of mental effort and challenge is the only way that you can tell whether the intensity is enough for you. You are the only one that will be able to feel that you are really trying your best to think in this way and learn in this way. And it's up to you to recognize whether you are able to persist through that challenge and feel that difficulty and stay there or whether you hit that difficulty and then bounce back and retreat into what's more comfortable for you. This is probably one of the most common reasons why people really struggle with creating this neuroplastic change with learning is that every time it gets difficult they instinctively come back to their comfort zone which is actually preventing their brain from rewiring. Now having said that uh you don't want to make it too challenging. So if you are at a 1 out of 10, you don't want to aim for 5 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 straight away. The idea here is that your patterns that exist might look like this. The pattern that you need to get to might be this. But this connection for your brain, it doesn't actually exist yet. So you're basically trying to use a pathway that you don't have. This is tied to this idea of the zone of proximal development which is a term that was coined famously by a psychologist called Vigodsky and they basically said the best point of learning is just outside of your current comfort zone and ability. So if this is your current level of ability, you want to be in this zone of proximal development here which is the things that are just beyond what you're currently capable of doing. And the way we know we are in that area is that we have some errors. It feels challenging and we probably don't feel confident with it. So these are actually good things. So that was to do with intensity. So I write here there's a sort of goldilocks zone that you want to hit which is your zone of proximal development. Not too easy, not too hard. The third one here is in variety. The most effective way of getting good at something and rewiring your brain is not to do the same challenging thing over and over again. It's to do slightly different challenging things over and over again. So, for example, let's say that there's a specific type of math problem that you want to get really good at solving and you want to wire your brain to be better at thinking about mathematics. So there might be a particular question that you're answering that's very challenging for you. Answering that question and just very similar questions over and over again runs the risk of turning your brain into autopilot. Which means that you do figure out that this is a good pathway to take. But instead of really consciously activating this pathway, it starts operating on autopilot. And this is actually detrimental in the early stages of learning because when your brain starts operating on autopilot too early, the brain chemicals that are released actually change and the chemicals that drive pathway strengthening and creation that drive neuroplasticity actually start going down. Now, on the other hand, when you challenge yourself with a bit of variety, so instead of just solving the exact same type of problem, you're choosing similar problems related to similar concept, but you're hitting it from very different angles and challenging yourself in more novel ways. Then this introduces more unpredictability. Sometimes it introduces errors. And that unpredictability and those occasional errors actually help your brain to

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

calibrate which pathways are better and which ones are worse. And it makes it clearer and more intentional at strengthening the ones that are effective. This principle actually applies for all forms of learning. Whether you're learning knowledge or learning a skill is that introducing a level of variety helps your brain to learn that thing faster. I've often talked about this concept using the term interle which is very closely related to this phenomenon. Now the good thing when it comes to learning to learn is that it's easy to get this variety because you're naturally going to be studying different things and learning different topics with different pieces of information. So as long as you're continuing to learn different things and you keep challenging yourself in different ways, you're going to hit that variety automatically. Now, what you may find is that when you hit that variety, you have inconsistency. You're able to really make it click and get really effective, efficient learning in one session, but then the next week it might be just as bad as it's always been. That's actually perfectly normal and it's part of your brain figuring out how to replicate that success more times. So, don't worry about the fact that you might have inconsistency or you're making errors. It's just all part of the learning process. Now, the fourth point here is frequency. Like I said before with going to a gym, lifting up a weight one time, doing one repetition, and wondering if you're strong or not. You can't go to the gym, do a single workout, and then expect that you're going to be stronger after that. You have to go back to that gym regularly. There has to be a certain frequency at the intensity. So this intention, this intensity, this variety, this all has to happen at a certain level of frequency for it to promote that neuroplastic change. Otherwise, what's going to happen is that you're going to send this concentrated burst of signals to the brain saying, "Hey, here are some pathways we want to strengthen and make more efficient. " And then it's going to start making it more efficient. And then a week later, it's going to realize, "Hey, guess we don't need this anymore. " And it's going to prune them back down. You know how they say that once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget? That's false. If you give it enough time, you will forget how to ride a bike because your brain is constantly pruning out pathways and connections that it doesn't need. Now, again, practically speaking, if you're learning to learn, part of this is easy for you to implement because you're probably learning continuously. You're not just learning something for one week and then you're just never learning anything for the next year. every single week there's probably something new for you to learn. So all you need to do is make sure that when you have those learning sessions, you're trying to hit a relatively intentional method of learning at a certain level of intensity that is in that Goldilock zone with that level of variety. And again, naturally the frequency should take care of itself. Now I will mention one thing though, which is that thinking about challenging yourself is not the same as actually challenging yourself. I have a lot of people who will watch my videos or go through the program and they spend a lot of time thinking about the methods and the strategies and the theory and so the frequency at which they are engaging with the material is very high but they actually only practice and apply that skill maybe like once or twice. It's not about how much you've thought about it. It's how much you actually immerse yourself in the practice of challenging yourself. And not only do you have to immerse yourself in that frequently enough, you have to do it for a long enough prolonged period of time, which is the fifth one here, the D, which is for duration. You have to hit yourself at the right intention, intensity, variety, and frequency for a long enough duration of time. Let's say you go to the gym 3 days a week doing some good workouts. You need to do that three days a week for years to get really strong. Now, you might be thinking, how long do I need to practice this for to get really good at it? And the research is very unclear about this. And so, actually, rather than drawing on the research, I'm going to have to draw from my own personal coaching experience and what I've seen with the students that work through my program and in my coaching practice. The short answer is that it really depends. It depends first of all on all these other factors. the intention, the intensity, the variety, and the frequency. And it also depends on your current baseline level. I've had students who were haphazard with their intention, didn't really expose themselves to much intensity. Every time they feel it was difficult, they would kind of pull back into their comfort zone again. They weren't challenging themselves very frequently. They were only practicing this maybe once or twice a week. and they will go years like two three years they'll be working on this practicing and not really make much progress because they're never really hitting that threshold for sustained neuroplastic change. So in that case

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

it's sort of an infinite amount of time. You're never going to get there because you're never staying above that threshold for long enough. Whereas I'll have other learners who maintain that optimum level of intention and intensity and variety and frequency and they're able to see changes within four to six weeks. And these could be two learners that have the exact same baseline level of skill. Uh but I did say that the baseline level does matter. But the way that it matters is how fixed those habits tend to be and how willing you are to change and experiment with them. Now, normally if someone is really struggling with learning and they've been struggling for a long time, they've never really been a great learner, then it also probably means that there are a whole host of habits that are not working well for them. There's bad habits there. And so, it actually takes them longer to see improvement because they have to do more work, not just using that neuroplastic change to become a better learner, but just to get them from bad to neutral. Likewise, a high achiever who's really stuck in their ways and doesn't want to change anything, is really rigid, they will again spend months, maybe years never really improving. But if you want a short answer for this, then the duration you need to maintain this pressure for even though it's possible to do it in weeks, if you have the right guidance and the intensity and the structure and everything, I would normally say you should expect that it's going to take you months up to years. But the good thing about this process of actually upgrading and rewiring how your brain learns is that it's not a binary process. It's not like you have to train yourself meditatively for months and then only after 10 months do you finally get your first good result. Every single week, every single month that you are engaged in this process, things are getting easier and easier for you. Your results are getting better and better. Your memory is getting better. Your understanding is becoming deeper and clearer. So, you're getting incremental improvements consistently. The thing that takes months or years is for that to start being more consistent, for it to be easier, and for you to be faster at doing it. But compared to what you may normally be doing or are used to doing, this is still the safer strategy because what you've previously been doing, if you're already hitting the ceiling of it, there's no real possibility for future improvement there. You're just going to continue having those same problems forever. Whereas with this one, you will have to do a little bit of hard work, but that hard work is actually going to pay off with something. And that payoff is going to be lifelong. So these are the first five. And you you'll notice that I've arranged them like this because they kind of build on each other. Uh but then there's three more factors and requirements for neuroplastic change which set as a foundation to all of these ones which mean that you need to have these three also really locked in. Otherwise the impact of these first five is going to be significantly reduced. So the first one of these more fundamental requirements is emotion. This is a really interesting one because research says that when a experience is more emotional and that this could be positive or negative it leaves a bigger imprint on your brain. And while you can't really make every study session a thrilling, exciting, memorable experience, and I also don't recommend trying to make it like a traumatic experience either. Uh there is an element of emotion that you can and should tap into, which is the idea of trying to create a level of dopamine. Dopamine is the happy hormone. When you have high levels of dopamine, which is a type of neurotransmitter, you feel good. So let's say you eat some food that you really love and you know you eat it and you think a so good and you feel happy. That's dopamine. The reason you feel that way is because of dopamine. And actually learning can produce dopamine if you do it right. And this is where it gets quite interesting because these processes that I talked to you about before where you're doing things really integrative and it's involving cognitive effort but that effort pays off because it's so much more effective. These are the ways that your brain initially is well adapted to learn. So your brain is really good at learning in that way and it really enjoys learning in that way. So when you learn with these processes, you should actually feel this sense of satisfaction or excitement about the fact that things are clicking together. You feel the knowledge taking shape. And yes, there's confusion and there's overwhelm at times. But when you get that moment where it clicks and it starts to make sense, that releases dopamine. And there's actually two reasons that the emotion and this dopamine uh increases that rate of neuroplastic change. The first reason is purely chemical. The chemical reason is that dopamine directly reduces the threshold that you need to reach for

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neuroplastic change to occur. That means that you can actually create that change with a lower level of intensity, less variety, less frequency and with less duration. You don't need to do that as intensely to still get that change. So it reduces the threshold directly. Dopamine also directly increases the gene expression of certain chemicals in the brain that create neuroplasticity. So these neuroplasticity chemicals are actually expressed more because dopamine triggers it. But the other reason is not chemical at all. This is purely psychological. Dopamine makes you feel good. When you feel good, you're more likely to do this thing again. It creates a positive feedback loop and this increases your level of motivation. So, when I said it's going to take you months or years of duration to maintain this and create this change, well, those months and years are going to fly by if you're actually having fun doing it. And that's important because everyone, every human brain is capable of neuroplastic change. But not everyone, very few people actually are able to successfully rewire the way that they think. And in my experience, the key differentiator is not the brain of each person, but how long they're able to stick with it. So that's where emotion comes in. The next one here is sleep. Apart from all the other things that sleep is so important for just in terms of your overall life, please don't sacrifice sleep. And anyone that tells you to sacrifice sleep, just unfollow them, please. They're not good for your health. Uh but sleep when it comes to learning and memory and the brain is incredibly important. One of the best pieces of advice, which was actually just a throwaway piece of advice that someone told me uh back when I was 18 years old, was you can cram as much as you like. Do as many allnighters as you want, but the night before your exam, get really, really good sleep. And that was because in sleep your brain does this thing called sleepd dependent memory consolidation which is basically all the stuff that you've been cramming in it actually moves that information into a more usable retrievable part of the brain. So if you don't get enough sleep that means that you may do all of the studying and you crammed all this information in your brain but then when it comes time to actually needing to use it for an interview or for an exam or you know just for work you're not actually able to draw on that information which is a shame. I don't agree with that advice. don't do all nighters all the time. Uh but I agree with the idea that sleep is extremely important. Now when it comes to neuroplastic change, it's actually even more important because during sleep, your brain goes into this kind of maintenance mode and uh it's during this time that it replays certain neural pathways that were activated during the day to strengthen them. It also prune the ones that are not necessary. And this is all very crucial for keeping your brain in good health. And so if you're constantly sleepd deprived, your brain isn't able to perform this maintenance properly. So not only do you feel terrible cuz you're sleepd deprived, but your concentration goes down, your focus goes down, your actual thinking capacity and your executive capacity goes down and your brain's ability to adapt and change and grow also reduces. So I'm sure you've heard this hundred times before. Get your sleep sorted. But if your sleep is still not sorted and you've heard it a hundred times, then let me tell you again, get your sleep sorted. I'm talking to you. It's not worth it to be sleepd deprived. Let's move on to the next one. The next one here is exercise. Specifically, uh especially aerobic exercise is good for brain plasticity. So, you know how I said that there's this neuroplasticity chemical that's released in your brain? Well, one of those chemicals is called B DNF. It stands for brain derived neurotrophic factor and it's one of the key chemicals that's involved in strengthening pathways, maintaining the brain and pruning unnecessary pathways and aerobic exercise actually seems to directly increase the expression of BDNF. So how much exercise do you actually need? What type of exercise? Uh when do you need to do it? There's actually a surprisingly large amount of research on this which is great. The good news is that any level of aerobic exercise, even done for a short amount of time, oneoff, has benefits. But there is a sweet spot. And that sweet spot is roughly three to five times per week, roughly 30 to 45 minutes per session at around a 6 out of 10 intensity. So intensity is like a pretty moderate like vigorous level of activity. And it's at this level when you hit this criteria that it's shown to

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produce long-term changes to your hypocample volume which is a key part of the brain involved in memory as well as long-term improvements in your memory and a higher baseline level of this BDNF chemical. But like I said, even a short amount can help. So you can just do like a 20 15 to 20 minute session at a moderate level of intensity and that can also produce a short-term increase in BDNF. And actually some studies have even found that you can do 15 to 20 minutes of exercise and then follow that in the next sort of few hours with some kind of mental task like studying or learning something. And it's shown that there's an improvement to your memory of what you learn in those few hours in that window compared to not having any exercise beforehand. So doing a little bit of exercise uh in the morning and then having a great focused deep work session that can be a really great combination plus getting good sleep. I mean what kind of what a great life you're living there. Yeah, I'm sure you're jealous of this hypothetical person already. Now, if doing this level of exercise this frequently is, you know, not easy for you, you can also do lower intensity exercise. So, even just going for a brisk walk can increase your BDNF levels, uh, just not to the same amount, but it's still better than nothing. Now, if you're like me and you really hate doing aerobic exercise, honestly, I really hate jogging, uh, you might be wondering, what if you just do strength training? You know, you go to the gym, you lift some weights. So the answer to this is that unfortunately it doesn't seem to be quite as good. There are some benefits because there are other chemicals in your brain that go up that do improve neuroplasticity. So it's for sure better than doing nothing. Uh but it's not as good as aerobic exercise. So unfortunately that does mean I should be talking to a mirror right now. You need to do some aerobic exercise. So anyway, these are the requirements for creating rapid neuroplastic change. You may also be wondering, is there a limit to neuroplastic change? Like, if I am truly starting at a 1 out of 10, can I one day be a 10 out of 10? And also, is there an age limit? Like, am I too old to be changing the way that my brain works? The answer is that there isn't a clear limit to neuroplastic change, but there definitely is a limit. So some of the best ways that you can think about this is that if you have a really severe brain injury or brain trauma, there are certain functions that at a certain level of damage, you will never be able to get that back. Uh so your brain is not able to neuroplastically just like heal itself from anything. So what that suggests is that there is some kind of limit to the pathways that your brain can create and prune. In my own experience as a learning coach for the past decade plus, I found that pretty much everyone is able to create really significant changes in their learning ability. Like you can start from having really bad memory to developing, you know, like very good memory beyond what you may normally have ever thought you were possible of. However, someone that is a let's say a 1 out of 10, it's pretty rare for someone to get all the way through to a 10 out of 10. But also most people don't ever need to be at a 10 out of 10 anyway. So in terms of answering that question as is it possible for anyone to improve and rewire their brain to be able to learn more effectively so much so that it makes a significant difference to their lived experience? Definitely. Everything that I've seen in my coaching experience supports that. Is there an age limit to this? Not that I've seen. In fact, I would actually say that my most successful learners have been in their 40s and 50s plus. And that may just be due to maturity that allows them to uh hit this threshold and maintain that threshold for a longer period of time more consistently than younger learners. I do know that um neuroplasticity is much higher in children, especially young children. I don't really have a lot of experience working with young children, so I can't comment on that. But certainly within adult learners between a 20-year-old and a 65 year old, I haven't really seen any significant difference. But I hope this helps. And again, I go through some of these concepts with more examples and practical takeaways in my newsletter as well. So, uh, remember the link to that to join is in the description below. And if you're interested in learning a little bit more around the processes of effective learning to make sure that you are really intentional about that, then you should check out this video here where I break down that process in a lot more granular depth. In this video, I kind of just gave you the cliffnotes summary of it. But this video is the one to check out if you want to familiarize yourself. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.