The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Shared Moment: Neuroscientist Reveals 4 Hacks to Rewire Your Brain For Growth & Success! - Dr Tara Swart
Fri, 21 Mar 2025
Your thoughts are more powerful than you think! Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart reveals how positive language, visualisation, and certain foods and exercises can supercharge neuroplasticity, rewiring your brain for growth and success. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/GRR8PSOdTRb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/lY2wnQVdTRb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr. Tara Swart - https://www.taraswart.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the mechanisms of neuroplasticity?
In your book, you talk about the mechanisms of neuroplasticity. What are the mechanisms of neuroplasticity and the three factors that have the biggest impact on changes in the brain?
So the first one is myelination and anyone who does a lot of sport who repeats a certain, you know, weight training will understand that that's what's happening in their muscles. You know, when I said, you know, you come here pretty much every day and you sit with someone and you interview them and you're really great at asking questions.
That's like something you're super good at that because you repeat it, it becomes like a superpower. And that means that what's happening there is myelination. So myelin is a fatty substance that coats some neural pathways and those pathways become fast pathways. Now, there's a reason from evolution why we have some fast pathways and some slow pathways.
And the reason is that if you put your hand in the fire, your reflex to snatch your hand out is a fast pathway. But your pain reflex is a slow pathway, because if you were incapacitated by pain, the minute you put your hand in the fire, you wouldn't be able to get away from it. One of the mechanisms of neuroplasticity is becoming even better at something that you're really good at.
And that's happened through myelination. The most common one, which is something that you're quite good at, but if you had loads of time, you could become really good at it, but you maybe don't have loads of time, happens through synaptic connection. So that's the one that can feel like quite hard work. But if you put in the effort, then you can change your brain.
So that means that neurons that already exist in the brain connect up with each other and start to form new pathways. And the third mechanism, which doesn't happen a lot in the adult brain, but it does happen around the hippocampus because we do lay down new memories in life, happens a lot in children's brains, is called neurogenesis.
And that is little embryonic nerve cells that float around in the brain actually becoming fully formed nerve cells, neurons, and connecting up through synaptic connection and maybe getting myelinated. And there's a factor, a growth factor that's involved in that, the embryonic cell becoming an adult cell, which is called BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor. And trophic means growth.
So neurotrophic is growth of neurons. And the things that contribute mostly to that are aerobic exercise and eating dark skinned foods. Yeah. Yeah.
dark skinned foods yeah so let me just cover the exercise one first because this is one of my fun facts which is that if you are regularly doing aerobic exercise the turnover of those cells in your brain is about 13 14 percent so like the the amount and the speed in which they like die die off no the speed in which they go from embryonic to full-grown so okay yeah okay so because we want neurogenesis to happen okay
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