By Philip Shepherd
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
A well-known neurological phenomenon is expressed in a catchy maxim: “What fires together wires together.” This phrase tells us that if two distinct neural pathways habitually fire together, they eventually lose their distinctiveness. The brain starts to treat them as one, because it’s more economical. As an illustration of this, researchers taped two fingers of a hapless monkey together for a period of time [rather cruel]; and when the tape was finally removed, the two fingers straightened together and bent together. Their neural pathways had been forced to ‘fire’ together, so they had ‘wired’ together.
There are many ways in which our neural pathways practice such economy in our daily lives, but the effect often remains hidden to us because the ‘wiring’ so often belongs to the culture that shapes us.
