The brain's plasticity to learn and change

"Every man can be a sculptor of his own brain if he sets his mind to it.

 Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Four distinct but interrelated brain areas. If we have not developed our reptilian part, we will not be able to maintain our goals. If we have not developed our limbic part, we will not be able to believe in ourselves. Whereas if we have not developed the neocortical part, we will not be able to be open to the ideas of others, to evolve and to improve. And finally, with the prefrontal brain we will give meaning to what we do, to our efforts and difficulties, so that we never give up and continue working to achieve our dreams.

The brains are progressively overcoming. In other words, the first brain is essential for the rest to be established correctly: this is how nature has defined it. We all need to have goals and achieve them and also to relate in a healthy way with our emotions and people, while evolving and improving and finding purpose in our lives.

It is true that human beings have a brain preference, each of us senses a predisposition to the brain's preference.. If you focus on goals, tasks and tangible results, you are more reptilian. If you focus on people, relationships, processes and good climate, you are more emotional. If you focus on learning, understanding and looking for the reasons behind your actions, you are more neocortical. It is important that you identify which is the preferred brain with which you work, so that you can understand yourself from a neuroscientific point of view, and from there intervene with greater success in any facet of your life and, in particular, in your relationship with money.

Until now you may not have stopped to think about what you felt before you acted, you may not have been as aware as you needed to be of why you were doing things. Everything you do from now on depends on your ability to learn: it is something you will need to do throughout your life. Knowledge is in the Neocortex, in the why? Answering that question is when we learn, when we get out of our comfort zone, out of our comfort zone, out of what we already know. You have to be willing to progress and feel the excitement of discovering new things. You can stay with what you know and not continue learning, either because you are not interested or because you don't have the humility to recognise that you don't know everything.

The neocortical brain is the brain of reflection and knowledge. It is the one that needs to learn and for this it has to develop listening and focus on understanding what it knows and what it does not know, in order to learn it. To know is to accumulate knowledge and has to do with making decisions and taking action; but to learn is to change, to innovate, to generate new knowledge continuously: it requires a large dose of curiosity, getting tired of what we already know and getting bored of always doing the same thing in order to be open to revolutionise.

Given that we learn what we are passionate aboutIf what we learn is positive, what we learn lasts over time and motivation emerges as a fundamental factor. For this very reason, a teacher has to be in love with his work because otherwise he cannot enthuse his students and they will not learn: they will only accumulate knowledge.

Until a few years ago it was believed that our brains were static and immutable, that we were born with a certain number of neurons that were lost over time and that our inherited genes conditioned our intelligence. Today, due to the progress of neuroscience experiments, we know that there is the neuroplasticityThe brain, a property of the nervous system that allows it to continually adapt to life experiences, which modify our brain all the time, strengthening or weakening the synapses that connect neurons.

Our brains change due to their amazing plastic and adaptive capacities.. It allows us to change as people and redefine our emotional situation with our environment through conscious effort. And our own thoughts are capable of generating neuroplasticity and conditioning our behaviour and learning.

"I am like this" is a self-imposed barrier to change. You behave differently depending on the context in which you find yourself and your habits can change and adapt to your needs. Therefore, the phrase "That's just the way I am" is a perfect excuse for not taking responsibility and leaving aside your ability to adapt, the ability that we all have and that makes us social animals. Do you want to improve? Do you want to evolve? Do you want to have a better relationship with money and even a much healthier economy? Take responsibility and get down to work: only you can make a difference and much of the success lies in the habits and skills you develop from now on.

The references in these articles to brain structures are made in a simplified, not exhaustively scientific method, in order to facilitate their understanding and application to everyday life.

Next Week: Money management habits and skills
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