Train your mind change your brain

I just finished reading a great book called Train your Mind, Change your Brain by Sharon Begley. It talked about how we learn and how our brains are plastic enough to change over relatively short periods of time. Blind people can learn to place sounds more accurately by using their visual cortex which is no longer receiving sight signals. When people learn Braille the sensory area of the brain related to the fingers used expands in just a few weeks. Pianists who repeatedly train one finger to work right after another can sometimes be hit with an affliction where the firing patterns merge into one brain area and the fingers always move together even if this is not desired. This is what I found most interesting as the movement patterns that affect most of us will also be changeable on a neurological level. Muscles are so used to working together in certain patterns that our goal is to first teach patients to move muscles independently before then teaching them new patterns. It reaffirms the importance of "Finding and feeling" muscles correctly with basic exercises and then taking this feeling and applying it to more and more complex exercises. We are literally making this a new "Patterns" in our brains. Very cool stuff!