Neuroplasticity: What It Is and How It Works

Written by Sonya Collins
Medically Reviewed by Jabeen Begum, MD on May 28, 2025
8 min read

Your brain is constantly evolving. Throughout your life, it reshapes, adjusts, and grows stronger in response to learning, new experiences, and your habits. This amazing shape-shifting ability is called “neuroplasticity.” 

Neuroplasticity is the mechanics that allow your brain to adapt when you gain knowledge or skills, encounter something new, or experience profound emotions like awe or grief.

It also helps your brain respond to challenges. For example, damage from a stroke may make it difficult for you to speak. But eventually, a different part of your brain may take over control of that function. As you recover, you redevelop your ability to speak using another area of your brain. Similarly, people who are deaf may have keener senses of sight and smell because the brain adjusts to make up for that missing sense.

Your every experience and interaction contribute to this wiring and rewiring of your neural network, the interconnected system formed by all your brain cells (neurons).

“It’s happening all the time, in every experience you have, even when you’re dreaming. You’re reshaping 100 billion neurons and tens of trillions, if not hundreds of trillions, of synapses – the connections between these neurons,” says Rudy Tanzi, PhD, director of the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Structural vs. functional plasticity

When your brain adapts, only its function changes at first. That's an example of functional plasticity. But with repetition, the brain's actual structure may change, too. That's structural plasticity. 

Functional neuroplasticity involves shifts in how your brain operates. Imagine improving your golf swing. You have the same arms, but you use them in a new way to execute this better swing. At the same time, in your brain, the neurons needed to execute that swing start firing in a new way. Maybe it’s a handful of neurons that have always been there, but they’ve never before communicated with each other. Now they must work together every time you take a swing.

As you keep practicing your swing, you'll eventually develop stronger muscles in your arms, back, and shoulders as a result of all that repetitive motion. And in your brain, new connections may form between those golf-related neurons that have been firing together since you started practicing.

“Early changes in the brain are ‘electrochemical,’ meaning existing neurons become more likely to fire in sync or respond more strongly to each other,” says Joel Salinas, MD, clinical associate professor of neurology at NYU Langone Health and chief medical officer at Isaac Health.  “Only with repetition do these changes become more structural, such as forming new synaptic connections or strengthening the architecture of a circuit.

“Over time, the brain’s physical structure actually reshapes to reflect these new patterns of activity. This is how we learn, adapt, and recover — by tuning and rewiring the brain’s circuitry based on what we do.”

 

Neuroplasticity includes many different changes that allow your brain to evolve. Here are a few of them. 

Neurogenesis

This is the formation of new neurons. While adults form far fewer new neurons than children do, experts think this still happens in the hippocampus (the area of your brain that's key to learning, memory, and navigation) and the olfactory bulb, which handles smell. 

Collateral sprouting

When neurons are lost or damaged, other nearby neurons may sprout new branches, called dendrites, to pick up the slack. Think of them as arms that extend from the healthy cells to the damaged area. The extra support could help replace lost connections with neurons. It might also help restore function to the damaged area. 

Synaptogenesis

Synaptogenesis is when repeated activity causes new neurons to fire together again and again until a new connection, or synapse, is eventually built between them. This happens quickly during childhood. It slows down in adulthood, but still happens when you gain knowledge and practice or repeat it. 

Long-term potentiation

Repetitive activity, like practicing that new golf swing again and again, can strengthen a synapse over time. This improves communication between neurons and makes it more efficient. 

Synaptic pruning

If you give up golf and stop using the connection between neurons that formed when you learned to swing, the synapse can weaken or be lost in a process called synaptic pruning. This isn't necessarily a loss of intellect or thinking ability. It’s a mental decluttering that keeps your mind efficient and sharp.

Functional reorganization

This is when a healthy part of your brain takes over the duties of another part, such as when you relearn to speak after a stroke. On the flipside, sometimes damage to one part of your brain affects the function of another part. This could happen, for example, because that function relied on a connection to the damaged area of the brain that's now lost. 

 

 

If your experiences prompt your brain to evolve, then can you try to have experiences that best support that process? And if so, could you assist in your own recovery from a brain injury? 

It was with these ideas in mind that researchers Jeffrey A. Kleim and Theresa A. Jones came up with “The Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity,” published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research in 2008. 

These principles, which help explain how learning causes changes in the brain that promote recovery from injury, are: 

  • Use it or lose it. If you don’t keep using that golf swing, you’ll not only lose that nice muscle tone in your arms, but also the connection you formed between the relevant neurons. 
  • Use it and improve it. As you continue to practice your swing, it should get stronger — and so should the related connections between your brain cells. 
  • Specificity. If you're trying to rehabilitate a certain part of your brain that was injured — for example, the area that controls balance — increased physical activity in general is not enough. You need to learn and practice new skills specifically related to balance.
  • Repetition. You can’t just learn something once and drop it. You have to repeat a newly learned skill or behavior often to cause relevant brain changes.
  • Intensity matters. The more intensely you practice your new skill, the more likely you are to cause structural changes in your brain.  That might look like practicing a new language for two hours a day versus one hour a week. 
  • Timing matters.  When you’re recovering from a brain injury, the sooner you start rehab, the better results you’ll get. 
  • Salience matters. You get better results from learning things that matter to you.
  • Age matters. Your brain continues to evolve as you age, but not as much as it did when you were younger. 
  • Transference. Promoting plasticity in one area of the brain can help enable it in other related areas. For example, relearning how to use utensils after a stroke could give you a leg up on other, similar motor skills. 
  • Interference. Learning something new can sometimes interfere with the next thing you learn, especially if you took shortcuts to learn the first skill. You might have to unlearn bad habits — and reprogram your brain — to learn the next skill.

     

The brain’s ability to evolve allows you to grow, learn, adapt and recover throughout life.  “It’s central to childhood development, skill acquisition, and behavioral change,” Salinas says. 

Even in the face of serious injury and damage to your brain, neuroplasticity kicks in. "It helps the brain respond to injury — for example, when other parts of the brain take over after a stroke or trauma,” Salinas says. It gives you hope that not all brain damage is permanent and some skills may be lost temporarily but not forever. 

Also, it doesn’t only help restore intellectual abilities. Neuroplasticity can help improve your mental health.

“It supports how therapy can change thought patterns, how habits form, and how our experiences shape who we are," Salinas says.

Tanzi urges people interested in keeping their helping their brains as healthy a possible to follow the SHIELD plan. That stands for:

  • Sleep. Get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. It's necessary to consolidate your memories and may help clear out potentially dementia-causing plaques. 
  • Handle stress. Have a go-to method of stress management, whether it’s meditation, exercise, a hobby, or quiet reading time. Long-term stress can contribute to brain inflammation. 
  • Interact with others. Strong social ties protect cognitive health. 
  • Exercise. Aim for 150 minutes a week (that's 30 minutes a day on five days) of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Exercise can stimulate nerve cell growth and help clear away harmful plaques from the brain. 
  • Learn new things. When you practice new and challenging activities or tasks, you promote the development and strength of synapses. 
  • Diet. A plant-based diet that’s high in fiber, whole grains, and healthy fats and low on red meat, such as the Mediterranean diet, is good for the brain. 

“These are all meant to minimize inflammation of the brain, which is the biggest killer of synapses and neurons, and maximize neuroplasticity,” says Tanzi, who co-authored Super Brain with Deepak Chopra.

 

Neuroplasticity is your brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout life. It allows you to continuously learn and develop skills and helps you recover from brain damage. Brain changes start as functional differences in how neurons communicate during new activities or while performing skills. With repetition, these changes become structural and create lasting changes in your brain’s architecture. You can enhance neuroplasticity with healthy habits like getting enough sleep, managing stress, exercising regularly, and following a balanced, plant-based diet. 
 

Does trauma affect neuroplasticity?

Physical trauma to the brain can cause damage that requires other parts of the brain to reorganize or grow and change to compensate for the damage.

Emotional trauma, or traumatic stress, also has an impact on neuroplasticity. Low to moderate, short-term stress can increase nerve growth and improve memory. But long-lasting, continuous stress can stunt nerve growth and impair your memory. The more it happens, the greater the risk that these alterations become hardwired. 

What exercise is best for neuroplasticity?

Exercise of any type is good for both the structure and function of your brain. Aim for at least 150 minutes of movement a week. If you want to up the ante, try out a type of exercise that also requires you to learn and practice something new, like ballroom dancing or juggling. 

At what age does neuroplasticity stop?

In a typical healthy person, neuroplasticity doesn’t stop. But the birth, growth, and strengthening of new neurons and synapses definitely slows down with age. 

What are the best foods to increase neuroplasticity?

A heart-healthy, plant-based eating plan like the Mediterranean diet is great for your brain. Some foods in this diet that might be linked to better brain performance include:

  • Leafy greens like kale and spinach
  • Healthy fats found in fatty fish
  • Nuts (especially walnuts), chia, and flax
  • Berries because of their high flavonoid content 

How long does it take to regain neuroplasticity? 

After a traumatic brain injury or stroke, neuroplasticity is heightened to help you recover. Tanzi says neuroplasticity is at its height in the first two to three months after a stroke, for example. 

What weakens neuroplasticity? 

Poor sleep, chronic stress, a sedentary lifestyle, an unhealthy diet, and a lack of new experiences or learning can all reduce neuroplasticity.

What substances increase neuroplasticity? 

Certain medications, including antidepressants, other mood stabilizers, and anticonvulsants, can increase neuroplasticity. There's some evidence that psychedelics may increase neuroplasticity in people whose brains have lost plasticity due to long-term untreated or treatment-resistant depression.

Does alcohol reduce neuroplasticity? 

Alcohol consumption – especially ongoing, heavy drinking – can kill brain cells and stunt neuroplasticity.