You want to be less anxious, you want to learn a new language, you want to be more functional in some way.

The key thing is to bring focus to particular perception of something that's happening during the learning process.

And the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine, and it comes from these two little nuclei down in the base of the brain called nucleus basalis.

All day long you're doing things in a reflexive way, but when you do something and you think about it very intensely, acetylcholine is released from basalis at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior, and it marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later.

So for people that want to change their brain, the power of focus is really the entry point, and the ability to access deep rest and sleep.

Because most people don't realize this, but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus, but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest.

So what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity?

The brain loves to be able to just do things, pick up coffee cups and drink and walk and talk and do things, and not put much energy into it.

When we decide to focus, what the brain really does is it switches on a set of circuits that involve the frontal cortex and nucleus basalis and some others, and it's trying to understand duration, how long something's going to last, path, what's going to happen, and outcome, what ultimately is going to happen.

So duration, path, and outcome.

If it's a simple example like to learn a new language, a new motor skill, or a new way of conceptualizing something, duration, path, and outcome is built into the networks of the brain.

We can do that very easily, but it takes work, and it almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration, and that's because the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system.

So when you or I decide we're going to learn something and really dig in, norepinephrine, which is adrenaline, is secreted in the brainstem and in the body, and it brings about a state of alertness.

Then our attention, which is mostly a diffuse light, is brought to a particular duration, path, and outcome analysis.

This would be thinking about what somebody is saying.

What are they really trying to say?

A hard passage of reading, a hard set of math problems, a challenging physical workout.

When you do that, these two systems have to work very hard, and the adult brain doesn't really want to change the algorithms it learned in childhood.

But if you do those two things, you have alertness and focus, the acetylcholine and the norepinephrine converge to mark those synapses for change.

The right approach is to bring as much focus to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern, and there has to be a sense of urgency.

If there's a serious contingency, like in order to get your ration of food each day, you have to learn this thing, the degree of plasticity is remarkable.

But if there isn't an incentive, it just isn't going to happen.

So these circuits in the brain that Mother Nature set up are designed to be anchored to a real need.

And people always say to me, well, should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn, or should it be out of fear?

Either one works.

The sense of urgency is just acetylcholine.

It's norepinephrine.

That's all it is.

The brain doesn't have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasureful or not until later.

Once you start accomplishing your goal, the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in.

But I think if people are interested in modifying their brain for the better, at least some top contour understanding of how urgency and convergence for that to happen can be useful.

Because I think there's a lot of attention paid to whether or not something feels like flow, or whether or not it's what I call highly desirable states.

But what's missing is the focus component.

If that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind, you'll get plasticity.

But you'll get plasticity in a kind of across the board.

It's like learning a little bit of nine languages all at once is not going to make you speak coherently in any one of them.