Posted by In 2015, the comedienne Ruby Wax stopped being funny and got serious. She wrote Sane New World, an excellent, simple, book about an incredibly important topic that almost no one knows about: Neuroplasticity and the brain.
She did this because she wanted to know why she became depressed from time to time, and how to change that problem. This is solved by an interesting feature of the human body called neuroplasticity.
Ruby Wax puts it very succinctly:
You can change your mind and how you think.
This is what neuroplasticity does. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change and reorganise its neural networks (structure and function) at any time. We can change our personality. How it does this is explained below.
Contrary to what people usually believe, our genes, hormones, regions in the brain and early learning are not an inhibitor to such things as our development, ability to change the way we are now, and our ultimate fate in this life (“our life story”). We can rewire ourselves at any age, it is not limited to our youthful years.
The way the brain adapts and changes from its prior state is very simple: Attention. We need to pay attention.
Attention is like a spotlight. Whatever our attention illuminates streams into our minds.
So we need to control carefully what goes into our minds as this shapes our mind, the way we think. Most of the time we aren’t really paying attention, we do things robotically. We need to learn specifically to pay attention, to become aware of what is streaming into our minds and what we ‘giving attention’ to.
Being able to multi-task is not actually helpful, but this is what most people are told to be able to do in today’s modern world.
The reality is that the part of the brain we need for learning and memory, the hippocampus, is only active during uninterrupted focus.
Interruptions of attention impair learning, so if (as Ruby Wax uses as an example) we are trying to learn Mandarin while speed walking on a treadmill, the learning won’t stick.
She says we need focused attention to grow neural connections in the hippocampus, that’s how learning happens. We can learn new skills at any age, we just need focus.
Focused attention builds up grey matter in the brain, which increases the ability to remember, and do specific tasks, no matter what age we are.
Attention also allows us to ‘see’ things for the first time, after we have perhaps walked the same road a hundred times. Look around, look up, see things differently. It’s a great feeling. It helped Ruby Wax overcome depression too.
Whatever we are doing, we need to pay attention. Then, our brain builds new connections. New knowledge, new skills are a wonderful thing to acquire.
The final thing is: Are we really awake? Or are we ‘asleep at the wheel’, doing things routinely, never breaking pattern, never changing our mind programs?
Because we only learn when we are awake, when we are paying attention.
As a Zen master once said, paying attention means what is right in front of you.
Not some far off dream.
But we can do so much when we pay attention, maybe even to reach that far off dream.
6 September 2025
Piers Morris Blogspot 