Stability vs Plasticity
People often say that it’s better to learn a language when you’re a child, because children learn faster than adults. By the time that we’re adults, our brains have become rigid to new experiences, and learning a new language takes much greater effort than it does for a child. The research supports this intuitive understanding of learning, and also reveals that there’s a bit more to the idea of brain flexibility and age then we might be aware.
Imagine loading luggage onto a roof rack of a car. The more luggage that you pack, the more efficient you’ll be, and the more stuff that you’ll take with you. On the other hand, the more that you pack, the less stable your equipment becomes, and the more effort that is required to secure your stuff. Take less stuff, and it is easier to secure your belongings, and the chance that you’ll lose some of your luggage on the way decreases. It is a yin and yang - there is an inherent trade-off. This analogy can be applied to learning. When you are young, you are constantly packing lots of luggage onto your roof rack. It looks like you’re learning at a rapid rate, only to realize when you look behind you, that you have lost a ton of knowledge as well. Children learn quickly, but they also forget easily. As we age, we tend to pack less luggage onto our roof rack. It appears as though we don't learn as quickly, which is technically true, but we also don’t lose information as rapidly. Essentially, our memory retention improves as we learn more slowly.
This principle may be intuitive to anyone who crammed before a test. Study very hard the night before a test and regurgitate all of the information the next day, only to realize a week later that you’ve forgotten nearly everything that you learned the previous week. On the other hand, study a bit every day and the information is retained for a much longer period of time. One method is faster and more efficient with a greater loss, while the other is more time-intensive, but has better long-term retention.
Now let’s introduce the concepts of stability versus plasticity in the brain. Stability, loosely defined, is the ability to preserve existing neural connections. While plasticity, on the other hand, is the ability to form new neural connections. When we were young, our brains were quite plastic, constantly forming, and reforming neural connections at a rapid pace. Our rate of learning was quick, but our connections weren’t stable unless they were continually reactivated. As we aged, our brains become more stable, preserving existing connections, but making rapid learning more difficult. Hopefully, at the later stages of our lives we are doing well and don’t need to be making entirely new neural networks.
The interesting part about this yin and yang of the brain’s learning abilities is that we have a great degree of control over our own plasticity. By changing our environment, exposing ourselves to new situations and challenges, and expanding our connections with our subconsciousness, we can begin to increase our brain’s plasticity. Think of it like a crab shedding its old shell for a newer one. The old shell was useful, but the crab has outgrown it. It needs a newer, more flexible shell that will accommodate its larger body and grow with it. Similarly, we may focus on preserving a stable brain during periods of our lives when we are thriving, only to shift our brains towards the plastic side when we need to learn and adapt to new challenges and situations. By recognizing these two extremes of our brains, and taking some simple actions to modulate our brain’s plasticity, we can begin to modulate the actual “hardware” of our brain to maximize our function for each specific situation. As research continues to make strides in this area, perhaps we will soon have pharmaceuticals that will allow us to simply enhance plasticity or stability with a simple pill.
The idea of increasing the storage on our computer has become familiar to us, and upgrading our hardware has become a normal process for our electronic devices. It’s time that we gain a better understanding of our own hardware, and begin to modulate its function to maximize our potential for learning or stability. They are our brains, and they are our lives. It’s time that we decide how our own hardware is wired. Welcome to the next frontier of biotechnology.
