Neuroplasticity and You
by Jeff Mariotte
Like many writers—most, probably—I’m often asked for writing advice. Because virtually everyone who speaks the language can put a pen to paper or jab at some keys and write a reasonable English sentence (although often not two in a row), many, many people think they could be writers of one kind or another, if only they knew the secret tricks. I try to dissuade some, while encouraging the more promising.
The advice I give most often, because it seems most true to me, is basically this: write, write, write. When you’re not writing, read. Then write some more.
This has felt, anecdotally, like the best advice I could come up with. Writing, I believed, is an activity that uses a particular set of “muscles,” and as with pole vaulting or hammer throwing, exercising those muscles often improves one’s performance. Writing a lot and consistently has made me a better writer, and I can’t help but think it would work for others as well. I don’t think any amount of exercise can make a bad writer good or a good writer great, but most of us fall somewhere in between those extremes, and strive diligently to improve our skills, to “master” our craft (only to find that, having gotten better at one aspect of it, other faults become glaringly obvious).
But it was all a gut feeling, without anything other than my own perception of my own experience—close-up and no doubt far from unbiased—to back it up.
Until now.
Now a writer named Sharon Begley has written a book called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. I haven’t read the book yet, although I hope to soon. But I read an excerpt from it in TIME, and from its descriptions of studies in neuroplasticity, it convinced me that my gut instinct was on the money.
In the excerpt, Begley talks about a Harvard study in which volunteers practiced a five-finger piano exercise, then took a test while a coil of wire sent magnetic impulses into their brains. This transcranial-magnetic-simulation test showed how much of their motor cortexes were used to control the finger movements they needed for the exercise. After just a week of practice, the bit of motor cortex used had literally spread, in Begley’s words, “over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.”
More significantly, the researcher running the experiment had another group of volunteers merely think about doing the piano exercise, without actually doing it, holding their hands still. Like the first test group, these people experienced expansion of the region of motor cortex that controls the fingers—even without using their fingers.
As Begley writes, “the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.”
There is, of course, much more to the article (and doubtless, to the book) than this. But just reading this much, combined with what I already believed about how writing begets better writing, caused an almost literal spark to ignite in my mind. The brain, Begley tells us, can be literally rewired simply through thought.
Tying this back into writing, the theory goes, by sitting and writing, one is exercising whatever region of the brain controls writing. Not just the movement of the fingers across the keyboard (although that is also something that gets better with practice, and is likely the result of motor cortex expansion of a particular sort). But mentally as well. What separates writing from typing is, after all, the mental activity underlying it. The use of the imagination, combining with what we know of stylistic standards, with inspiration about characters and plot points and turns of phrase, remembering seeds planted early in a story and bringing them to fruition later on (or remembering the flowers we “saw” in our mind’s eye and making sure to plant the seeds in the right place)…these are some of the things that our minds are up to, almost without our conscious participation, while we sit at that keyboard or with that notebook and write.
Doing all of these activities at once is not easy, and it’s a testament to the power and intricacy of the human mind that we can do them at all and not fall out of our chairs or choke on our own spit. (And I am not, lest you wonder, denying having either of those experiences while writing. But I’ve survived them.)
My experiential judgment that my writing improves by the doing of it leads me to believe that writing frequently and consistently—and just as important, thinking about writing, pondering plot twists and character arcs, visualizing scenes, the daydreaming in the shower or the car or tilted back in my desk chair with my hands locked behind my head—is physically rewiring my brain. I don’t know what parts of it are giving up ground—the part that does math, I’d guess, and maybe the part that remembers who gave me what for my birthday last year. But I don’t miss those parts as much as I’m appreciative that my skills continue to grow, that I haven’t hit a plateau as a writer, that maybe it’s not possible to do so unless some other, less helpful brain wiring mechanism kicks in and overrules the rewiring.
We’ve all read writers who start out good but then get better and better as they age. We’ve probably read others who get worse—but not as many, and there are very likely reasons for that deterioration—overuse of alcohol or drugs, laziness, creeping dementia, or others. For most of us, age brings experience, practice, maybe something resembling wisdom. And our brains have been fixing themselves to operate more efficiently at whatever it is we do most.
Does practice make perfect? Of course not—there’s no such thing as a perfect work of creativity. If there were, we might stop striving toward that goal. But does practice make better? Of course. Now we know at least part of the reason why.
