Imagine you could swallow a capsule that would renew your brain plasticity: this would give you the capacity to reprogram your neural networks to learn new languages rapidly and adopt new accents and new views of physics. The cost is that you’d forget what came before. Your memories of your childhood would be erased and overwritten. Your first

We suggest that dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex from being taken over by neighboring areas. After all, the rotation of the planet does not affect anything about your ability to touch, hear, taste, or smell; only vision suffers in the dark. As a result, the visual cortex finds itself in danger every night of a takeover by the other senses.

For example, Jewish religious scholars study the Talmud by sitting in pairs and posing interesting questions to each other. (Why does the author use this particular word rather than another? Why do these two authorities differ in their account?) Everything is cast as a question, forcing the learning partner to engage instead of memorize.

when children are born cross-eyed or wall-eyed, the activity from the two eyes is not well correlated (as it would be with aligned eyes). If the problem is not addressed, the child will not develop normal stereo vision—that is, the capacity to determine depth from the small differences between what the two eyes are seeing.

Reward is a powerful way to rewire the brain, but happily your brain doesn’t require cookies or cash for each modification. More generally, change is tied to anything that is relevant to your goals. If you’re in the far north and need to learn about ice fishing and different types of snow, that’s what your brain will come to encode. In contrast, if

For a short time, the government of France forced newly released prisoners to marry local prostitutes, and then the newlywed couples were linked with chains and shipped off to Louisiana to settle the land. But even these French efforts were insufficient.

Tossing facts at an unengaged student is like throwing pebbles to dent a stone wall. It’s like trying to get Fred Williams to absorb tennis.

Your brain assigns more ground to that frequency, because the presence of reward indicated that it must be important.

The highest level—where the best learning occurs—is achieved when a student is invested, curious, interested. Through our modern lens, we would say that a particular formula of neurotransmitters is required for neural changes to take place, and that formula correlates with investment, curiosity, and interest.