In this podcast, Andrew Huberman talks about neuroplasticity and explains how our brain and the nervous system learns. He also provides some tools and techniques that can help us for increasing focus and learning. You can listen to the full podcast here: How to Focus to Change Your Brain?
Neuroplasticity is about how our brain and the nervous system learn and acquire new capabilities through different experiences. These experiences could be happy or traumatic events. Such as developing phobias or experiencing your childbirth, graduation, etc.
Development of our neuroplasticity
Up to age of 25 our nervous system establish new connections that help us to do specific tasks. It is easier to change our nervous sytem in young age. After the age of 25, we have to go through certain processes to change our nervous system and brain.
How our nervous system change?
Chemical and environmental circumstances can change our nervous system.
The first step in neuroplasticity is recognise what you want to change. Once you have the awareness of the circumstances and decide to make a change, certain chemicals are released in the brain that help us with those changes.
Experiences that you pay extra attention will open up a way to change in placticity. Because, paying extra attention helps to release two neurochemicals.
The first one is Epinephrine that is released when we pay attention. It is for alertness. A good sleep routine is crucial for Epinephrine release. Caffeine also helps, but you will need to experiment with how it affects your sleep.
The second one is Acetylcholine is a chemical act as a spotlight that directs your attention to a specific thing. It helps with focus.
How to increase focus?
Doing some simple visual exercises can enhance your focus. your mental focus is anchored to your visual focus, so you can use your visual focus to increase your mental focus.
So here are few things you can do to help to increase your focus:
- When we move our eyes slightly inward, we activate epinephrine and Acetylcholine release.
- If you are having a hard time focusing mentally, practice focusing on your visual system.
- Spend 1 minute or two focusing visual attention on what you are reading. This practice will increase brain activity that helps with gathering information. Also, you can practice staring at a point without blinking to help with this.
- The focus period is usually in 90 minutes cycles. These periods also called the learning period. The First 5 to 10 minutes of this period is warm-up. During the warmup period, your attention might drift but refocus with your eyes. Out of 90 minutes, you should be able to focus about an hour (eliminate distractions).
EndNote
Please keep in mind that these are my own key takeaways from the podcast. This blog post is not written to replace the original content and there are still lots of useful information you can get from the podcast (How to Focus to Change Your Brain).