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“Relationships between neuronal structure and function underpin the complexity of human organization: the individual’s thinking, feeling and doing.” – Gerald Edelman
Neuroplasticity (the brain’s capacity to alter its structure and function in response to experience) has transformed how we understand learning and human development. The brain is better understood as a living system shaped over time by opportunity, attention, understanding, effort and repeated meaningful applications in real life.
When participating neurons repeatedly fire together, their connections strengthen. Learning, whether cognitive, emotional, or motor, make changes in the brain by connecting and reinforcing particular pathways. Over time, these pathways become more efficient, more reliable, and more influential in shaping our perceptions, feelings, and behaviors.
Brain connectivity changes for many reasons, including:
– developmentally, when the young, underdeveloped brain begins to process sensory information
– following disturbances in sensory activity, auditory, visual, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, nociception (pain), etc.
– following certain kinds of disorder, dysfunction or damage to the brain or body
– following lived experience, learning, thinking, doing
Brains can reorganize in response to external or internal stimuli, to nurture, to learning, to environmental changes.
Learning does not require new brain cells as much as new ways for existing cells and neural pathways to work together. Synapses, the junctions through which neurons pass electrochemical signals become stronger and more efficient with use. Neural networks become better organized, and brain regions involved in a skill and understanding becomes smoother and more coordinated.
Experience that is focused, effortful, repeated, meaningful and practiced in daily life changes synaptic structure, shifts in neurotransmitter release and causes changes in receptor sensitivity.
From the perspective of Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development, learning is most powerful when cognitive, emotional, and relational dimensions develop together. Assessment does not merely measure outcomes, it actively mediates learning by guiding attention, shaping effort, and providing feedback. When learners engage in tasks that are relevant to real life tasks that matter to them the brain is more likely to reorganize in durable ways and serve as scaffolds for more complex learning and problem solving.
Practice and challenge are essential. Tasks that stretch ability without overwhelming the child drive both functional and structural brain changes. Over time, effort, understanding and success stretches capacity. Newly formed neuronal structures and functioning support emotional regulation, language acquisition and more complex reasoning.
Chronic stress can severely impair brain functioning and learning. Prolonged exposure to stress hormones are associated with reduced functioning in memory-related processes and heightened sensitivity in threat-detection. The brain is tuned in more for survival rather than growth. It becomes more active in expecting and in detecting danger, but less flexible and adaptive in more intentional thought, emotion and communication.
The right kind and amount of daily physical exercise, nutrition, restful, restorative sleep and nurturing human relationships are linked with overall brain health, strengthen synaptic connections and functioning, and are linked to better learning, emotional regulation, motivation and more adaptive and functional development.
Meaningful brain change requires effort, patience, and persistence, and happens when learning is challenging, varied, and connected to real life, when it engages the whole person rather than isolated skills.
Neuroplasticity assures that change is possible, but meaningful change is selective and slow. The brain is shaped by what we repeatedly do, attend to, and care about.
Neural imagery and neuroplasticity research demonstrate that experience leaves a mark. Brain structure and function mediated by interpersonal engagement, parallel learning, positive mediation and communication and human relationships addressed to real-life experiences affects changes in the mind and brain. And changes in mind and brain alter the course of our development.
Shaping Neuroplasticity
According to the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, “the human brain is not a fixed machine, but a living system designed to change. It is built to alter its own structure and function across the lifespan, to revise its circuits in response to experience, and to expand or contract its capacities according to how it is used. The brain is not merely capable of learning, it expects to learn. It depends on active engagement with the world and learning to construct intentional functions and successful adaptations.”
Every experience leaves a trace. Every action, thought, emotion and sensation reshapes the nervous system. We are constructed by what we experience and what we do. Our brains are continuously connecting and reconnecting neurons into networks, dissolving some pathways, strengthening others, responding to changes, to demands and to learning.
Left idle, the brain does not remain the same. If stimulation lacks meaning, relevance, or reward, neural systems gradually weaken. Attention dulls, imagination shrinks, memory becomes unreliable, and problem-solving is confusing, frustrating and unsuccessful.
The brain changes most readily when information matters. When experiences are interesting, emotionally significant, purposeful, or challenging, the nervous system responds with measurable functional and structural shifts, more relevant attention, deeper exploration, stronger memory formation and improved skill acquisition.
For many children, particularly young children, highly sensitive children, or those with attentional, cognitive, emotional, motivational, or communication difficulties their brains may be flooded with stimuli deprived of understanding and meaning. Neuroplasticity does not disappear, it becomes misdirected. The brain continues to wire itself, but not in ways that serve the child’s learning, interpersonal relationships and development.
Brains change best in the context of engaged lives and supportive relationships. Children and adults alike need daily participation in experiences that are interesting, purposeful, appropriately challenging and accompanied by a sense of success. We need opportunities to develop skills, to take on responsibilities, to explore and solve problems, and to feel that our efforts matter to us and to others.
Interpersonal relationships are especially powerful. Through communication, shared attention, play, and guided learning, the brain learns not only what to think, but how to think. When children face real neurological obstacles to change they require skilled, patient adults who understand how to scaffold experience in ways that invite the brain to rewire itself.
As a child’s ideas, feelings and actions become more organized, their skills more fluent, and their understanding more coherent, the neural networks that support those abilities strengthen and synchronize. Purpose grows. Function improves. Learning accelerates. The brain, given the right conditions, begins to teach itself how to change more effectively.
Our brain is not designed to remain static. Neither are we. The human brain is built to require novelty, effort and growth to develop. Because the human brain is plastic, what we do matters. Who we connect with, what we are learning and how we are learning matters.
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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