The Rewired Mind

Draft for the author · not yet in her words

The expectation that things will go wrong is not fixed in human nature. It is a pathway, and pathways strengthen with use. Donald Hebb proposed in 1949 that connections between neurons grow stronger when the neurons are active together, often summed up as "cells that fire together wire together." A thought repeated often enough becomes part of the wiring.

This is what neuroplasticity points to. Eleanor Maguire's 2000 study found that London taxi drivers, who spend years memorizing the city's streets, had measurably different hippocampi from people who had not. Cognitive therapy, tested in many trials, shows that changing how a person habitually reads events changes how they respond to them. The brain is reshaped by what it practices.

Probable, not proven

Put the three chapters together. Probability rather than a hard can and can't; the corollary that what can go right will tend to go right where the arrangement holds; and a brain that rewires through practice. Seeing what can go right is something a person can train. I do not claim this as proof. Only the doing of it can prove anything. I claim it as probable, and I have lived inside the probability long enough to say the odds are better than we were taught.

That is where a renaissance begins for one person: not in being promised a good outcome, but in building the arrangement, inside and around oneself, that keeps tilting toward it.

Hebb, D. O. The Organization of Behavior (Wiley, 1949). Maguire, E. A. et al. "Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers." PNAS 97 (2000): 4398-4403.