Even half a century ago, it was believed that the brain is like cement: it freezes by the age of 25, and then only cracks. Today, neuroscientists know that this is not the case. The brain is more like plasticine. He is rebuilt every day, all his life, under the influence of what we do, think and feel.
This property is called neuroplasticity — the ability of the nervous system to change its connections in response to experience.
It works like this. There are about 86 billion neurons in the brain, and each is connected to thousands of others through synapses. When you repeat an action, the corresponding synapses are strengthened — more signal passes through them. When you stop, they weaken and may disappear. The brain constantly decides which connections to leave and which to remove. This is called synaptic pruning.
Simply put: what you train grows. What you throw away fades away. It works for muscles, memory, and attention.
In the 1990s, Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, studied London taxi drivers. To get a license, they have been memorizing 25,000 streets for years — a phenomenon known as “The Knowledge.” Maguire did an MRI and found that experienced taxi drivers have a ** hippocampus * * — the area responsible for spatial memory — physically larger than ordinary people.
And the longer a person works as a taxi driver, the larger this zone is.
It was a fracture, and it turned out that learning literally changes the structure of the brain.
Further — more. Studies of meditation have shown a thickening of the prefrontal cortex in practitioners. Studying musicians — enlarged areas responsible for hearing and motor skills. Even in stroke survivors, the brain took over the functions of the damaged areas through adjacent areas.
Neuroplasticity is not a metaphor; it is a measurable fact.
The most harmful belief is that memory can be trained only in youth. This is not true.
Yes, in childhood the brain is more plastic: it quickly learns languages, learns motor skills, easily recovers from injuries. But plasticity doesn't go away. It just becomes more selective: it is more difficult for an adult to learn Chinese from scratch, but it is easier to connect new knowledge with existing knowledge.
A 2018 study led by Rachel Wu from Harvard showed that people in their 60s and 80s who regularly engaged in cognitive training not only improved their memory, but also their ability to solve everyday tasks. The effect persisted a year after the end of the program.
Another study, ACTIVE (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly), lasted 10 years and confirmed that training memory and processing speed in the elderly reduces the risk of age-related cognitive decline.
The conclusion is simple: age is not a sentence. A sentence is a lack of workload.
If this is how neuroplasticity works, what exactly is worth training? Research identifies four areas that give the greatest effect:
1. Memory. Working memory (hold the phone number in your head for 10 seconds), episodic (remember where you were last Tuesday), verbal (remember the list of words). Each of them trains separately.
2. Attention. Ability to keep focus, switch between tasks without loss, ignore distracting stimuli. The classic test is the ** Stroop effect **: you need to name the color of the ink, not the word. Try it — it's harder than it looks.
3. Processing speed. How quickly the brain receives and processes the signal. Reaction time worsens with age, but trains — in elderly people who played games at speed, the indicators improved by 20–30%.
4. Logic. Ability to notice patterns, draw conclusions, solve non-standard problems. It is not the knowledge itself that is important here, but the flexibility of the mind — the ability to switch between strategies.
It is these four areas that Gage closes — 13 games, each coaching its own aspect.
Training for the sake of training does not work well. In order for neuroplasticity to turn on, you need to follow several rules:
Regularity is more important than intensity. 10 minutes every day is better than an hour once a week. The brain anchors a skill through repetition, not through a one-time feat.
Novelty is required. If you do the same thing on the machine, the brain stops straining. You need to make the task a little more difficult than you can do now. In Gage, this is built-in: each game grows in level as soon as you have mastered it.
Progress should be noticeable. The brain releases dopamine when it sees it getting better. This motivates you to keep going, so Gage has a graph that shows you how you're growing.
Sleep is part of the workout. Neuroplasticity largely occurs in sleep. If you play until 3 a.m. and get up at 7 a.m., the effect will be zero. Sleeping 7–8 hours is not a "rest from training", it is their continuation.
Exercise enhances the effect. Aerobic exercise (running, swimming, cycling) increases levels of BDNF, a protein that literally helps neurons build new connections. Train your brain and body together.
It is important to be honest here, otherwise you will get another "brain magic".
"Developmental games" without progression — do not work. If you play the same Sudoku for 5 years in a row, the plasticity in the desired zones has long stopped. The brain needs novelty.
** Memory pills are almost always empty.** The market for nootropics is huge, but there are very few studies that would prove their real effectiveness in healthy people. Exceptions are caffeine and, in rare cases, creatine, but these are not “mind pills”, but rather sports nutrition for the brain.
"The left hemisphere is logic, the right hemisphere is creativity" is a myth. This is a simplification from the popular psychology of the 1970s. The brain works holistically, and it is impossible to train the "hemispheres separately".
If you've finished reading, try one thing. Open Gage, complete one game. No matter what, just look at how the brain responds to a new task.
In 5 minutes you will have:
Repeat tomorrow. Compare in a month. Neuroplasticity does the rest.