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The Richer Your Life, The Richer Your Brain

Plasticity is the brain's ability to change in accordance with experience and learning. Plasticity makes the brain adaptable and flexible, able to adjust its circuitry at any stage of life to incorporate new experiences and new learning. A baby's brain is highly plastic, because its synapses are in a kind of hyper-state of change. Adolescence is another developmental period when the brain is hyper-plastic.

The good news for those in the working world is that the brain's capacity for plasticity continues throughout life, albeit at a less feverish pace than during its development.Throughout our lives, our knowledge and experience leave their fingerprints on our brain, creating a network of synaptic connections that is as rich and dense as we make it.The richer our life, our work, and our learning, the richer our synaptic network will be.

Do you lose your way in navigating a new online technology or office procedure? Have you ever completed a training program full of new ideas, then had trouble remembering some of the ideas you just learned?

Today's multi-tasking, ever-changing workplace can make it difficult to put enough focus on one task or idea to hard-wire it into your brain. But if we want to learn something really well, to make it part of our "identity," as neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz says, we've got to pay attention - and not just once but over and over.

Schwartz points to the example of a training program to increase productivity. With the program alone, productivity may increase modestly for a while. But add follow-up coaching, and productivity jumps - from 28 percent to 88 percent in one study. (ref-1)