Feed your Brain -- Take your Q

Take you Q Contrary to the notion that the brain has fully matured by the age of eight or twelve, with the truly crucial wiring complete as early as three, it turns out that the brain is an ongoing construction site.  The hardware of the brain is far from fixed at birth.  Instead, it is dynamic and malleable. Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of neurons to forge new connections, to blaze new paths through the cortex, even to assume new roles.  In short, neuroplasticity means rewiring of the brain. Modern neuroscience is now demonstrating what William James suspected more than a century ago: that attention is a mental state (with physically describable brain state correlates) that allow us, moment by moment, to "choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work to choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense... Those choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves."  If James was speaking metaphorically, he was also speaking with almost eerie prescience. For it is now clear that the attentional state of the brain produces physical change in its structure and future functioning. Conscious thoughts and volitions can, and do, play a powerful causal role in the world, including influencing the activity of the brain.  Willed mental activity can clearly and systematically alter brain function.  The exertion of willed mental effort generates physical force that has the power to change how the brain works and even its physical structure.   The result is directed neuroplasticity.                                                                       --  Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. and Sharon Begley                                      The Mind and The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force