Neuroplasticity

Your Brain - Reflections

Taken from Dev Academy pre-course work dev-journal-day-1 In this prep exercise the goal was to understand how knowing about neuroplasticty of the brain can help us become better learners. Neuropliasticity is basically your brains ability to reshape itself depending on how you are using your brain. This can help people understand that they can grow their brains and that it’s not a fixed thing from birth.

What I found interesting is engaging this concept we can facilitate the neuroplasticity of our brains by confronting what we don’t know, and being curious about learning new things. A few ways that we can influence this is by actively trying to learn something new not unlike this Dev Academy course. Physical exercise and mindfulness are some other things that can help facilitate this brain growth/restructuring that is always happening.

One of the examples used was describing the neural networks like highways connecting different cities. The highways with the most traffic would get wider and bigger, and the ones with the least traffic would be smaller, and if something changed and one path started getting more traffic, the neural network would adjust the sizes to match. Therefore the more we focus on a certain thing the stronger those pathways get.

Another concept mentioned is the idea of a growth mindset. This is something I have always thought about myself, because I love learning and have always been curious. From what I understand about a growth mindset is being open to challenge and not being afraid of failure, knowing it is on the road to success will help you more easily adapt to a growth mindset.

Incoporating into my learning plan

Way’s I will incorporate this into my learning plan, include using spaced repetition facilitated by Ankiweb.net.¹