I’ve been straining my capacity to absorb new experiences. The privilege of relative material security lets me do the work of actively seeking out more variance and novelty.
I was reading up on the basics of neuro plasticity on Perplexity and learned that we think of plasticity in a few ways. Neurogenesis is the growth of new neurons.
But the type we mostly mean when saying neuro plasticity (or learning new things) is from “synaptic cells plasticity” forming new neural connections.
Without that adaptability we couldn’t change in response to new environmental conditions or in response to injury or disease or other stresses.
I’m am inside a few new high variance experiences right now which I hope will yield new neural connections. I find it to be a bit stressful as it’s a lot of novel inputs in a short period of time.
Some experiences translate as shared reality which has the same rules anywhere there are humans. But adjusting to new social mores is always jarring.
I’ll only briefly mention it, but this is the first time I’ve been somewhere that the call to prayer is a normal prominent feature of daily life. It’s rewriting synaptic ritual time for me. I like it more than I would have imagined.