How Learning New Skills Rewire Your Brain

You are born with the machinery to from beginner to professional

Every time you learn a new skill, you change your brain. More specifically, you change the connections inside it. This ability to change according to the challenges it faces, is called neuroplasticity.

Whatever skill you want to build, you are born with the machinery to transform a beginners clumsiness into fast, fluent action. That machinery (your body and brain), is controlled by you. Our bodies and brains are amazingly adaptable, and will gradually try to adapt to any challenge or condition you present it to.

If presented with a challenging environment, our body and mind changes. Muscles gets stronger, hearts and lungs get larger and brain connections become faster and more focused. This reorganisation of the brain is the basis of all skill acquisition and development.

The body itself does not know why these changes happen. But it is programmed to constantly reorganise itself to make things as simple as possible. The body and mind prefers when things are easy, and so will try to adapt itself to make it simpler to perform a task next time.

By straining your body when learning a certain skill, you are signaling that this is important, and telling it to devote more resources to this challenge.

The results of practicing a specific skill, is that we are strengthening neural connections, which makes it much easier to perform fast, fluent and precise actions.

The connections between neurones in the brain are very plastic, meaning that they can change a lot. By practicing a new skill, you start creating new connections and pathways in your brain. If we keep practicing, these connections will become stronger, which leads to improved performance in the skill.

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