Brain plasticity - motivation & relevance as necessary mechanisms

Your brain can adapt to virtually anything. Brain plasticity—the capacity of the brain to recalibrate itself based on the environment and context—is one of the most powerful mechanisms within human beings.

Matt Stutzman learned to play archery with his feet at a world-class level because he had no arms. His body adapted and created different configurations unique to the available conditions (no arms).

This is important to know when it comes to skill development. You can learn virtually anything you want if you do want it and take the time and effort required to learn the thing. The most important elements for brain plasticity are motivation and relevance, combined with feedback and praise. The mix of these components can lead to incredible brain plasticity over the long run. The brain’s map changes as you develop skills to adapt to the new knowledge acquired.

That’s not just at a child level, which may be most obvious when reading this. Also in adults. Motivation and relevance are mostly intrinsic (internal) factors at the foundation of brain plasticity and skill development. Without those, you can’t learn any skill significantly because you would give up early if starting at all. You need motivation toward a vision/goal, or at least a direction. You need relevance specific to that vision/goal.

Feedback and praise are somewhat external and can be maximized with the help of other people who are truly willing to help without strings attached. Feedback guides on those times when you are correctly following the direction toward the goal or missing the mark and need to course-correct. Praise provides fuel for consistent effort over time, which is necessary for any skill development.

You can notice how as humans, we can’t fully escape the inherent interplay between individual and group. Your individuality and intrinsic motivation drive you forward toward what attracts you. The people around you can reinforce or shut down your pursuit.

Interestingly, relevance is one of the main differences between human and AI “brains”. AI models don’t have the concept of relevance toward a goal, so they need to be trained on very large amounts of data with a lot of redundancy in the system to ensure learning. Humans need much fewer data points to connect the dots because we can understand the contextual relevance of a certain thing to our pursuit.

Last, you can only learn a skill through active practice. Mere exposure doesn’t create the same results.

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Relevant research/sources:

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