When my friend Pat and I were undergrads at UBC, we teased each other about drinking coffee. We'd heard it killed brain cells.
Being young and unversed in mortality, we didn't worry about the brain cells we'd lose over the long term. Nor did we brood over the idea that such losses would leave us daft or ga ga as we aged.
The accepted wisdom of the time was that you were born with a certain number of brain cells and that if damaged, these could not regenerate. Once lost, they were thought to be gone forever.
That was wrong. As many experiments have demonstrated, the body has an astonishing capacity to heal. Leading-edge thought now holds that healing capacity is limited mainly by our inability to believe in it.
The brain grows to compensate for injury. As explained on MedicineNet, the process of "axonal sprouting" means axons can regenerate damaged neural pathways.
"Neurons that fire together wire together," says Hebb's Law. But strong neural pathways can work both for good and ill, and that's where Dr. Joe comes in.
Dr. Joe Dispenza has written extensively on Hebbian learning. He also discusses the corollary, "neurons that no longer fire together no longer wire together." Thus, destructive thought sequences can be weakened by disuse and eventually pruned from the brain.
Brain plasticity is scientifically understood and easily demonstrated, and the implications are magic.
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