Willis also found this to be true in her middle school classroom. Not only did those students who already believed this do better in school, but when researchers actively taught the idea to a group of students, they performed significantly better than their peers in a control group. Researchers Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University, along with Kali Trzesniewski and Carol Dweck of Stanford University, published a study in the journal Child Development in 2007 that found that both morale and grade points took a leap when students understood the idea that intelligence is malleable. It turns out that if you tell students about this, it can have an effect on their brains too. The more times the network is stimulated, the stronger and more efficient it becomes." Changing Brains in the Classroom
Thus, says Willis, "Practice makes permanent. Over time, these connections become thick, hardy road maps that link various parts of the brain - and stimulating one neuron in the sequence is more likely to trigger the next one to fire. Neuroscientists have been chorusing "cells that fire together, wire together" since the late 1990s, meaning that if you perform a task or recall some information that causes different neurons to fire in concert, it strengthens the connections between those cells. The fewer cars traveling that way, however, the fewer lanes are needed. Like in a system of freeways connecting various cities, the more cars going to certain destination, the wider the road that carries them needs to be. When people stop practicing new things, the brain will eventually eliminate, or "prune," the connecting cells that formed the pathways. This means that when people repeatedly practice an activity or access a memory, their neural networks - groups of neurons that fire together, creating electrochemical pathways - shape themselves according to that activity or memory.
Your Brain on LearningĪccording to neurologist and educator Judy Willis (and suggested by a research-rich chapter in the second edition of Developmental Psychopathology, among many other publications), neuroplasticity is defined as the selective organizing of connections between neurons in our brains. Rather, it's forming and developing throughout our lives. Intelligence is not fixed, it turns out, nor planted firmly in our brains from birth. Despite the fact that the concept of neuroplasticity is broad, vague, and hardly new (the theory was born in the mid-1800s and was heavily researched throughout the 1990s), it is one of the most reliable and fundamental discoveries about the brain that we have to date.
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