Why your brain is more powerful than you think?

Have you heard of the neurosurgeon who helped his father recover from a debilitating stroke by training his brain? Or about a girl who was diagnosed with a learning disability at age 4, but at age 21 raised her IQ by 50 points after training her brain relentlessly? And yet these are all true stories if you too, like the speakers at the session, believe that the brain can be trained to learn anything.
Speaking on the brain’s marvellous abilities, Kumaar Bagrodia said ‘neuroplasticity’ is the ability of the human brain to change till its last breath.
“It was a medical myth that you have to live with brain that you are born with. The adage, ‘He is old and set is set in his ways,’ is not true. Your brain is producing and losing neurons every day. But whether you produce or lose is up to your lifestyle,” he said.
According to Jerry Pinto, the Sahitya Akademi Award winning author who has written extensively on mental health, human brains are like supercomputers yet people end up wasting it.
“As we get older, and we give ourselves leeway not to use the brain and it ends up in that computing power being wasted,” he said.
He cited the case of a relative, though he is suffering from a debilitating disease and has to be fed via a tube, who decided to learn ancient Farsi because he knew that his brain was intact, and could be trained.
Bagrodia said the mind is a construct while the brain is an organ. “My mind is not my brain and if I can have a healthier brain then I will have a healthier mind. And a healthier mind experiences happiness, calmness, and has the ability to focus. The mind relies on the brain’s computing power to function. And just like you cannot have the latest software on a dilapidated phone, similarly, you have to look after your brain for the health of your mind,” he said.