Photo by Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash)
Society has an adage that both enables and underrepresents one of our largest collective challenges. We say someone has “become stuck in their ways.” We treat it as a choice they keep making or a personality trait they’ve hardened into. Depending on the stance, people use this to justify looking past that person’s behavior or to blame them for not progressing with the world around them. However, this behavior is more complicated than a personality trait. It actually has to do with how we as humans neurologically operate. When we say someone is rigid in the way they think, it could be because their brain is actually anatomically more rigid. I find this both fascinating and perhaps a little unsettling.
The brain follows a muscle-like rule, the same as the rest of the body: use it, or lose it. You’ll notice I didn’t say, “The brain is a muscle.” That is another adage that is technically untrue, but I believe is shorthand for an underlying principle that is easier for people to understand without needing to understand the full neuroscience, the same way gym-goers say you have to “confuse your muscles.” No matter how dopey we like to portray muscle-heads in the media, they don’t actually think the muscles are becoming confused. When we talk about confusing the muscles, what they’re really saying is that we need progressive overload. Muscles become more efficient the more they do a motion, and muscular growth may plateau as a result. This highlights that “use” is a nuanced term. Likewise, a factory worker who does the same motion over and over not only can be out of shape, despite using their muscles for hours and hours on end, but they can even develop things like tendonitis. The work is real and the exertion is real, but the body solved that particular load long ago, so the labor maintains a problem it already adapted to rather than building anything new. The brain is similar in that how we use it, not just how much, affects overall health.
Research has found that our brains have a plasticity to them that may slow with age, but for all intents and purposes lasts the entirety of our life. What affects it more is how we use or don’t use it. The parts of the brain used for activities become stronger, even showing larger in scans. People who rely a lot on directional navigation show measurable differences in the regions that handle spatial reasoning. People who are stressed all the time, the part of the brain that handles stress gets bigger and therefore better at being stressed. It’s a double-edged sword.
The other thing to know about the brain is that it is highly efficient. It builds neural pathways that shortcut learning for tasks we repeatedly do. You can loosely think of this as the brain has adapted to the demand like muscles do but the mechanism is different. Ultimately, this allows us to do more and more complicated things, like walking while talking or driving a car. It also is how knowledge builds on itself with time because our brain builds linkage between concepts and ideas that enable you to dig deeper in a subject without having to relearn everything again. As we get older, more and more of these shortcuts exist and we’re able to navigate our lives more and more on “autopilot.”
Since the brain behaves like a muscle that experiences hypertrophy or atrophy based on how it is used, this means that the more we learn the larger the learning centers become, and the less we learn, the smaller they become, making it easier or harder to learn something new. There is no evidence that says a human can completely lose the ability to learn, but the cost to activate a learning mindset becomes more and more costly. This cost scales with the difficulty of the demand.
In order to learn, one has to often recall memories and write new ones. There appears to be a strong correlation between degenerative neurological disease that affects memory and how the brain is used. What we have found is that not only regular exercise, but specific neurological exercises have a tendency to delay the onset of degenerative neurological diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s. To be clear, there is no direct evidence that a lack of exercise causes these diseases, but if we apply what we already know about the brain, we may someday discover a correlation. When our brains repeatedly do something, they create and strengthen neural pathways. If we recall the same memories repeatedly, the retrieval becomes less effort. Essentially, it’s the cognitive version of the factory worker repeating a solved motion. This creates a strong argument for learning as a necessary exercise for overall brain health.
Then there is a psychological aspect to this equation: humans have a natural affinity to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. This has served our ancestors for generations and we exist today largely because of this urge. As learning becomes more foreign, in particular the familiarity with uncertainty or being wrong, it becomes something that we naturally want to avoid. This feeds the decrease in plasticity, which furthers the avoidance behavior.
So when someone is rigid in the way they think, it means that their brain has become highly optimized for the life it has already lived, and a brain tuned that precisely to the familiar can lose its capacity for the unfamiliar. To return to the question we started with, when someone has become set in their ways, should we excuse or be angry with them? Understanding why is not the same as condoning it. But if the cost to learn has quietly climbed this high for a person, then treating their rigidity as a simple choice is more nuanced. It is not that the capacity is gone, or that they bear no responsibility. It is that the same act of changing one’s mind may require more effort and patience from all parties than it would with someone who actively learns and whose brain pays a lower price to adjust. The agency is diminished and unevenly distributed, not absent. That distinction isn’t to impose an obligation on anyone, but if your end goal is to promote change, then this understanding should absolutely affect how we respond.
This means that someone who has become rigid or overly conservative in their thinking likely needs “physical therapy” for their brain. They need to learn to flex those muscles on small, trivial actions that strengthen the underlying foundation, before jumping into stronger held convictions that may have the added complexity of identity threat. You don’t rehab a torn ligament with strongman (or woman) level weight training. Since physical therapy focuses on neuromuscular re-education, I’ll call this neurocognitive re-education with the goal to rehabilitate neuroplasticity.
I want to be clear, this is a simplification of entire sciences, and some of these are rationalized inferences based on correlated data, but if correct, it creates an interesting premise for invoking change in individuals, society, or organizations. It suggests that the path back is not a grand intervention but a structured, low-cost habit of small, deliberate learning. What we might simply call scientific thinking: forming a question, testing against reality, and updating from the result, over and over, until the muscle returns.
Methods built explicitly on that loop, like Toyota Kata, may turn out to be a form of exercise for the one capacity our longevity and our collective awareness both depend on. But it doesn’t require formal practice. If you’re a baker, cook something. If you’re a cook, bake something. Learn a few phrases in another language. Pick up a new hobby or participate in a child, grandchild, niece, or nephew’s favorite activity (after all, the adage says you’re only as old as you feel). Whatever you choose, give yourself permission to be a beginner again.
Further Reading:
1. Korb, A. (2015). The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time. New Harbinger Publications.
2. Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398–4403. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.070039597
3. Wilson, R. S., Barnes, L. L., Aggarwal, N. T., Boyle, P. A., Hebert, L. E., Mendes de Leon, C. F., & Evans, D. A. (2010). Cognitive activity and the cognitive morbidity of Alzheimer disease. Neurology, 75(11), 990–996. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20811001/