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For many years, the consensus was that the human brain couldn't generate new cells once it reached adulthood. Once you were grown, you entered a state of neural decline. This was a view perhaps most famously expressed by the so-called founder of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. After an early interest in plasticity, he became sceptical, writing in 1928, "In adult centres the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated. It is for the science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree." Cajal's gloomy prognosis was to rumble through the 20th century.
[...] This, then, is the truth about neuroplasticity: it does exist, and it does work, but it's not a miracle discovery that means that, with a little effort, you can turn yourself into a broccoli-loving, marathon-running, disease-immune, super-awesome genius. The "deep question", says Chris McManus, Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at University College London, is, "Why do people, even scientists, want to believe all this?" Curious about the underlying causes of the neuroplasticity craze, he believes it is just the latest version of the personal-transformation myth that's been haunting the culture of the West for generations.
[...] Even the people whose lives are being transformed by neuroplasticity are finding that brain change is anything but easy. Take recovery from a stroke. "If you're going to recover the use of an arm, you may need to move that arm tens of thousands of times before it begins to learn new neural pathways to do that," says Downey. "And, after that, there's no guarantee it's going to work." Scott says something similar about speech and language therapy. "There were dark days, say, 50 years ago, where if you'd had a stroke you didn't get that kind of treatment other than to stop you choking because they'd decided it doesn't work. But now it's becoming absolutely clear that it does, and that it's a phenomenally good thing. But none of it comes for free."
On the other hand, the new brain hackers are using electro-stimulation to make it easier to re-wire pathways.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:01PM
I think it's pretty clearly a load of horseshit to say that people can't transform themselves almost completely if they want to. I've had a stroke, extreme sodium deficiency and severe head trauma at various points in my life and I can tell you that it's definitely possible to become a different person by thinking differently.
I'm not sure who said it, but habits make the man. Most of the things that people point to as personality are actually a series of habits that have developed and responses that have been conditioned. The only real question is how many of them need to remain the same for you to still be you.
Foreign language isn't any easier as a child than it is as an adult. At least up until the point where you personally are declining cognitively. It's just that the older you get the less you need to learn it and generally the less time you have available to lear. But, hour for hour, an adult learns significantly faster than a child. Mainly because an adult isn't simultaneously learning how things work. If we see a door, we know that it's a door, we just need to know what it's called. Same goes for most other things.
For years, I've used video games and horror movies to stimulate my brain into putting me into a very deep relaxed state.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:45PM
Foreign language isn't any easier as a child than it is as an adult.
Personal anecdotal evidence suggests that you're wrong: I required 2 years to start properly speaking Greek (age 25+), whereas I needed only one month to speak German (age 7).
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday November 20 2015, @07:39PM
Barring an intervening head injury, you were doing something horribly wrong.
If it took you 2 years to start properly speaking Greek, then you weren't putting the time into things that would take you to the goal. There's plenty of people that manage to get there in under 3 months. Benny Lewis has a whole blog dedicated to it. I think he overstates it a bit, but the reality here is that there's no evidence of any sort to support the idea that it's harder to learn languages as an adult. The whole idea is absolutely ridiculous and mostly spread by Americans that are too ignorant to realize what's happening basically everywhere else in the world.
Basically the reason why you picked German up in one month at age 7 is because the standards were much, much lower. I'd bet just about anything that if you compared how much German you were speaking then against a native speaker or an advanced non-native speaker, that it wouldn't really be that impressive. I was able to learn all the Chinese that I needed for daily living in about 2 months of self study. There's a ton more I needed for more complicated transactions, but I could get myself around the country using just my spoken Chinese in most cases.
The thing is that I'm not exceptional there's plenty of people out there that have been able to get further in the same amount of time. If it took you 2 years to be speaking Greek properly, then either you weren't really working at it, or your methods were sloppy and inefficient. Because people regularly learn more quickly than that.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday November 23 2015, @12:51AM
In both cases I didn't use books or had formal training. In the case of Greek, I wasn't forced to communicate using Greek, however, as I could use three other languages, so in a sense you're correct in assuming an inefficient method.