The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

ATTENTION CHANGES THE BRAIN—AT ANY AGE

The principle of neuroplasticity, which is supported by robust neuroscience research results, opens a world of possibilities. The idea that adults can change both the function and structure of their brains was considered heretical a little over a decade ago. Orthodox science accepted that infants’ brains grow and develop at an enormous pace, but become fixed at a young age. Beyond making connections required for establishing new memories, and allowing for inevitable decline, disease, and accident, adult brains were thought to be largely set in stone—not at all “plastic.”

The series of experiments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that overturned this assumption is described by Sharon ...