I spent years assuming my personality was fixed — then I learned what neuroplasticity actually means and realised I had been maintaining myself like a finished product instead of a living system

The adult human brain contains somewhere between 86 and 100 billion neurons. Each of those neurons can form thousands of synaptic connections. For most of the twentieth century, scientists believed that after a certain point in childhood, the architecture of those connections was essentially complete — that the brain, and by extension the personality it [...] The post I spent years assuming my personality was fixed — then I learned what neuroplasticity actually means and realised I had been main