We’ve all been there – struggling to retain information, feeling frustrated that learning seems to get harder as we age. As a neuroscientist, I was angry for a long time that this critical knowledge about how our brains learn wasn’t taught to us from an early age.
The truth is, we’re not just born as “good learners” or “bad learners.” While it’s easier for kids to pick up new skills rapidly, adults absolutely have the ability to become powerful learners too by harnessing the neuroscience of peak cognitive performance.
The key is recognizing that learning represents an incredible feat of neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to physically change its structure and form new neural connections through experience. Every time you learn something new, billions of neurons are wiring together in new ways.
I’ll walk through 6 powerful ingredients that create optimal conditions in the brain for neuroplasticity and accelerated learning to occur:
1, Attention:
Have you ever re-read the same paragraph multiple times because your mind started wandering? Focused attention is absolutely critical for encoding new information into memory successfully.
Our prehistoric ancestors didn’t have to work nearly as hard to concentrate. With the endless distractions of modern life like smartphones and multi-tasking, we have to be much more intentional about controlling our attention.
The best way to improve attention is through regular practice of focused meditation. Research shows this can physically remodel the brain’s attentional circuitry over time.
For more immediate attention enhancement, try doing 20 minutes of moderate exercise beforehand. This has been shown to boost focus for 2 hours through increased oxygen, nutrient delivery, and activation of attention-oriented brain regions.
2, Alertness:
You need to be awake, alert, and vigilant for accelerated learning to occur. This activates the brain’s fight-or-flight system, priming it for taking in new data.
Physical movement is one way to induce this physiological state. Intense exercise isn’t necessary – even light exercise like walking, dancing, or doing jumping jacks can increase alertness through the release of biochemicals like adrenaline.
Breathing techniques like the Wim Hof method, splashing cold water on your face, or taking a cold shower can give you an invigorating wake-up call. Moderate stress can also promote alertness, though chronic stress is detrimental.
3, Sleep:
While awake, active states are critical for initially encoding information, sleep is deeply crucial for consolidating that learning into long-term stores of memory.
During sleep, the hippocampus – a key region for learning – transfers newly-formed memories to be encoded more permanently in the cortex and other brain areas. Lack of sleep cripples this consolidation process.
For any new skill or information you need to master long-term, be sure to get sufficient, high-quality sleep in the 24 hours after your learning session. Think of it as giving your brain the night shift to perfectly solidify what you crammed in earlier.
4, Repetition:
In school, we’re often taught a topic through a single study session or lecture. But mastery requires repetitive practice over time.
Each time you re-encode a memory, you reinforce and rebuild the surrounding neural structures, making the pathways stronger, more extensive, and more precise. With enough repetitions, that knowledge essentially gets etched into your brain.
The strategy of “spacing” repetitions out over multiple days, giving your brain a break in between to solidify the learning, is particularly powerful. Two shorter sessions on different days lead to much better mastery than one marathon cram session.
5, Breaks:
Taking a 10-20 minute break after an intensive period of learning allows your brain to go into a RAM-like reprocessing mode. During this downtime, your neurons quite literally “re-play” and re-encode the recently acquired data at 20X faster speeds than the original input.
These breaks are also essential for preventing retroactive interference that can degrade the new memories. What you learn next can overwrite and erase the previous input if you don’t let sufficient time and space occur in between sessions.
6, Mistakes:
Perhaps counterintuitively, learning is actually accelerated when you embrace mistakes as opportunities rather than sources of anxiety or embarrassment.
When your brain registers that you made an error, it goes into a heightened state of plasticity, with increased neurochemical release and blood flow priming it to update its connections. That unpleasant feeling of failure is simply your brain’s signal that revision is needed.
By creating practice scenarios where you make judicious mistakes and errors, you open up prime windows for accelerated rewiring of your neural circuitry. Games, quizzes, and other desirable difficulties help make this process both effective and enjoyable.
When you combine all six elements – attention, alertness, sleep, repetition, breaks, and mistakes – you create tremendously fertile soil for the flowering of rapid learning to occur in your brain.
Does this mean you can instantly become a savant or mastery overnight? Of course not – meaningful learning still requires diligent practice over time. But by taking advantage of these neurological principles, you give your brain’s neural plasticity mechanisms a supercharged boost.
Imagine confidently approaching any new skill or body of knowledge, armed with a blueprint for optimizing your brain’s performance. No more wasted hours staring at books or lectures with depleted focus. No more rote memorization that fades within days or weeks.
Instead, you feel sharp, alert and able to install new neural software updates with remarkable speed and durability. You enjoy the process of effortfully installing these new circuits, taking intentional breaks to let your brain’s backroom processing integrate the changes.
Over time, you build a vast interdisciplinary web of neural links versus isolated data silos. Your comprehension becomes broader, richer, with ideas compounding in creative permutations. You rewire faulty belief systems and outdated habits like a skilled neurosurgeon delicately adjusting your inner loom.
No longer a victim of neurological decline with age, you continually expand your cognitive potential throughout life. In this energized state, the very activity of learning itself becomes profoundly rejuvenating.
This is the spectacular possibility that awaits when you unlock your brain’s superpower of lifelong neuroplastic adaptation. We may not be explicitly taught this as children, but the knowledge itself equips us to become students of our own unique brains for a lifetime of highly optimized learning adventures.