Hwu Hai-gwo, the chairman of Taiwan’s Mental Health Foundation and a professor of psychiatry at the National Taiwan University Medical School, is a forceful advocate for “brain training.” Hwu believes that we can exploit the plasticity and trainability of our minds to establish positive thought patterns that make us better able to cope with stress.
He says that psychologist Donald Hebb discovered as early as 1949 that the brain’s neurons form dense interconnections, and that the distribution of neurons on the surface of the cerebral cortex changes based on a person’s behavior and experience.
Hwu uses riding a bicycle to illustrate the point, noting that once someone has learned to ride, they retain that ability even after a decade of not having ridden because they have etched the necessary neural pathways onto their mental maps.
Hwu says the brain has a mechanism that allows it to change in response to the demands of the environment. When a situation and behavior become linked, the brain forms a new neural pathway. The hippocampus and relevant neural networks then store this specific behavioral reaction where it can be retrieved the next time the person encounters an identical or even just similar situation. Over time, this pathway becomes a kind of automatic process that changes the brain’s structure and capabilities.
What this means is that with training we can utilize the brain’s inherent plasticity to develop and strengthen the kinds of neural connections that enable us to better face life’s travails and better control our own fates.
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