Myelin Quotes

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

The association between the post-encephalitic syndrome and demyelination or incomplete myelination of the brain seems quite secure. And the fact that encephalitis -including that caused by vaccination- can cause demyelination has been known since the 1920's!

It's also why we've recently seen an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline.

disease affects the insulating fat, or myelin, around nerve

mental activity such as directing attention, actually shape the structure of the brain?” As we’ve seen, experience means neural firing. When neurons fire together, the genes in their nuclei—their master control centers—become activated and “express” themselves. Gene expression means that certain proteins are produced. These proteins then enable the synaptic linkages to be constructed anew or to be strengthened. Experience also stimulates the production of myelin, the fatty sheath around axons, resulting in as much as a hundredfold increase in the speed of conduction down the neuron’s length. And as we now know, experience can also stimulate neural stem cells to differentiate into wholly new neurons in the brain. This neurogenesis, along with synapse formation and myelin growth, can take place in response to experience throughout our lives. As discussed before, the capacity of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity We are now discovering how the careful focus of attention amplifies neuroplasticity by stimulating the release of neurochemicals that enhance the structural growth of synaptic linkages among the activated neurons.

This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. In

But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.

Beneath it is the much greater volume of white matter, which is so called because the neurons are sheathed in a pale fatty insulator called myelin, which greatly accelerates the speed at which signals are transmitted.

(The production of myelin by OPCs in the brains of infants and children helps explain how they do smart things; the incomplete myelination of the prefrontal cortex in the brains of teens helps explain why they do stupid things.)

Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

B1 to harvest energy from glucose, the end result of digesting carbohydrates. Brain cells especially rely on glucose for energy, since other sugars cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. The brain also needs thiamine to make myelin sheaths and to build certain neurotransmitters.

the following supplements are recommended specifically for MS. They’ll help reduce pain and protect your myelin sheath as you heal from EBV: EPA & DHA (eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid): omega-3 fats to help protect and fortify the myelin nerve sheath. Be sure to buy a plant-based (not fish-based) version. L-glutamine: amino acid that removes toxins such as MSG from the brain and protects neurons. Lion’s mane: medicinal mushroom that helps protect the myelin sheath and support neuron function. ALA (alpha lipoic acid): helps repair damaged neurons and neurotransmitters. Also helps mend the myelin nerve sheath. Monolaurin: fatty acid that kills virus cells, bacteria cells, and other bad microbes (e.g., mold) in the brain. Curcumin: component of turmeric that reduces inflammation of the central nervous system and relieves pain. Barley grass juice extract powder: contains micronutrients that feed the central nervous system. Also helps feed brain tissue, neurons, and the myelin nerve sheath.

(1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

It only requires that you stop a skilled person from systematically firing his or her circuit for a mere thirty days. Their muscles won't have changed; their much-vaunted genes and character will remain unaltered; but you will have touched their talent at the weakest spot in its armor. Myelin, as Bartzokis reminds us, is living tissue. Like everything else in the body, it's in a constant cycle of breakdown and repair. That's why daily practice matters, particularly as we get older. As

The other major hormonal player in your cycle is progesterone. It helps to prepare the uterus for implantation with a healthy fertilized egg and supports pregnancy. If no implantation occurs, progesterone levels drop, and another cycle begins. Progesterone receptors are highly concentrated in the brain. Progesterone can support GABA, the brain’s relaxation neurotransmitter; acts to protect your nerve cells; and supports the myelin sheath that covers neurons. I like to think of progesterone as the “feel-good hormone.” It makes you feel calm and peaceful and encourages sleep. It’s like nature’s Valium, but better, because instead of making your brain fuzzy, it sharpens your thinking. It has also been shown to help with brain injuries by reducing inflammation and counteracting damage. It is so much more than a sex hormone. Progesterone increases during pregnancy, which is why many pregnant women often feel great. Some women with hormonal issues, in fact, feel so much better during pregnancy that they will

Neuronal maturity doesn’t happen at the same pace across the human brain. Some regions are completed much earlier than others, and the frontal lobes are the last to receive the finishing touches. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, the most complicated region, which provides us with cognition and judgment, demands the most sculpting. The final step in making a neuron work optimally is to have the long axonal cables wrapped in a fatty insulation from the surrounding glia, a process called myelination. Only then is the brain fully grown.

No brain region is an island, and the formation of circuits connecting far-flung brain regions is crucial—how else can the frontal cortex use its few myelinated neurons to talk to neurons in the brain’s subbasement to make you toilet trained?2 As we saw, mammalian fetuses overproduce neurons and synapses; ineffective or unessential synapses and neurons are pruned, producing leaner, meaner, more efficient circuitry. To reiterate a theme from the last chapter, the later a particular brain region matures, the less it is shaped by genes and the more by environment.3

Music is exquisite and requisite. It is the creative juice that greases the machinery for insight and serendipity. It unlocks the right brain, opening a door to novel domains. It constructs neural networks and fosters pattern recognition. It trains willpower and discipline. Playing music builds a bigger and better highway between the two sides of the brain. Its myelinated interconnectivity nurtures out-of-the-box thinking and simulates meditation and flow. Like dreaming, it allows our powerful unconscious mind to sift and filter all the accumulated detritus into a meaningful story.

Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell. The relative saturation of these membrane fats could affect the aging of cells and the likelihood that blood cells will clot in vessels and cause heart attacks.

The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here's why. Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.

EBV is a virus that chronically inflames nerves. Most strains of EBV are mild and less aggressive, but its multiple sclerosis varieties eat away at the myelin sheath, which is what creates the distinct set of symptoms associated with this disease. (As for your immune system, not only is it innocent of any wrongdoing, it’s your primary defense against MS. When your immune system gets what it needs, recovery is possible—and within reach.) Something else that distinguishes MS from other forms of EBV is that it’s accompanied by a unique combination of bacteria, fungi, and heavy metals. Specifically, if you have MS, you’ll typically have the following EBV cofactors in your system: Streptococcus A and Streptococcus B bacteria H. pylori bacteria (or at least a previous case of H. pylori) Candida fungus Cytomegalovirus The heavy metals copper, mercury, and aluminum—these metals weaken the immune system’s ability to protect the body from viral nerve damage

These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)

A region of the brain becomes mature when it settles down into a lean, functionally well-organized system. A good proxy for neural pruning in the brain is the relative density of gray versus white matter in a given region. Gray matter, the neuron-rich part of the brain that does the bulk of the computational work, decreases in density as a region matures. As gray matter density decreases, the density of white matter—the myelinated axons that transmit information, the outputs of the computational work done by gray matter—increases, resulting in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility. One way to envision this is to see an immature, gray-matter-rich region as an undeveloped, open field, where one can wander in many directions unconstrained, but not very efficiently. In order to get to that wonderful blackberry bush to harvest some fruit, I have to bushwhack my way through vegetation and ford streams. The gradual replacement of gray matter by white matter reflects the development of this field: As roads are laid and bridges are built, I can move around more easily and quickly, but now I’m going to tend to move only along these established pathways. The new paved road to the blackberry bush makes gathering blackberries much more convenient, but rushing along on the new road I will miss the delicious wild strawberries I would have otherwise stumbled upon in the brush. There is a trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, between discovery and goal achievement.

Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect—is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties. This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing—they can actually do it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain—known collectively as the limbic system—which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. “If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.

Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust. Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

The glial cells support every neural fiber, collect these fibers into bundles, and separate these bundles from the surrounding tissues and fluids. They give the nerve fibers the tensile strength and elasticity to stretch where stretching is needed, and they fix the nerve bundles securely to other structures where stability is needed. This surrounding glial tissue also comprises the ground substance for the intercellular metabolic activities attendant to the needs of the neurons, mediating the interchange of nutrition, gases, hormones, and waste products between nerves and capillaries, and carrying the white blood cells, antibodies, and other immune factors which guard the lives of the irreplaceable neurons. Other specialized glial cells—oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells—insulate the long axons with a tough, fatty coating called myelin. This insulation prevents signals from one axon inadvertently “leaking” into adjacent axons, and it also speeds up the passage of a neural impulse considerably. Myelin is whitish in color, giving the so-called “white matter” of the nervous system its name. “White matter” contrasts to “grey matter.” the color of cell bodies and axons that are not coated with myelin sheaths.

Dorsal The dorsal column system runs through the “white matter” of the spinal cord. It is white because its axons are insulated with white, fatty myelin, which increases their transmission speed considerably. Their speed—from forty to seventy meters per second—is also enhanced by the fact that there are few synapses to cross from the peripheral sensory ending to the cortex. Like the corticospinal motor pathway, these fibers have a high degree of spatial organization throughout the length of the spinal cord, and like the corticospinal pathway, they faithfully map the relationships of their origins onto the cortex. This system transmits touch sensations which have precise localizations and fine gradations of intensity, phasic or vibratory sensations, kinesthetic sensations related to body parts in motion, and sensations which have to do with fine distinctions of pressure.

It has long been known that interoceptive signals are largely conveyed to the central nervous system either by neurons whose axons are devoid of myelin, the C fibers, or by neurons whose axons are very lightly myelinated, the A delta fibers.

As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

The failure to appreciate these concepts – recency, implicit memory, myelination, overlearning, automaticity, and task complexity – explains a lot of the misinformation that is heard when human performance is discussed.

We are myelin beings. The broadband is myelin, and the installers are the green squidlike oligodendrocytes, sensing the signals we send and insulating the corresponding circuits.

As we’ve seen, science is only recently discovering that both fat and cholesterol are severely deficient in diseased brains and that high total cholesterol levels in late life are associated with increased longevity.24 The brain holds only 2 percent of the body’s mass but contains 25 percent of the total cholesterol, which supports brain function and development. One-fifth of the brain by weight is cholesterol! Cholesterol forms membranes surrounding cells, keeps cell membranes permeable, and maintains cellular “waterproofing” so different chemical reactions can take place inside and outside the cell. We’ve actually determined that the ability to grow new synapses in the brain depends on the availability of cholesterol, which latches cell membranes together so that signals can easily jump across the synapse. It’s also a crucial component in the myelin coating around the neuron, allowing quick transmission of information. A neuron that can’t transmit messages is useless, and it only makes sense to cast it aside like junk—the debris of which is the hallmark of brain disease. In essence, cholesterol acts as a facilitator for the brain to communicate and function properly.

The bottom line is this: a brain that can ping-pong information with maximal speed and efficiency is considered “mature,” and since myelin speeds up signal transmission, it is a fair yardstick of maturity.

the prefrontal cortex is not fully myelinated, while the neurons in the limbic system are. And that means that if two messages are sent simultaneously, one to the limbic system and one to the prefrontal cortex, then in the tween or teen brain the message going to the limbic system will arrive much faster—3,000 times faster. The prefrontal cortex just cannot be accessed as readily as the limbic system. And that means that our kids can and often will make emotional or impulsive decisions

Pausing is one of the most powerful tools in the face of incomplete myelination. If signals travel faster to the limbic system, messages just need a little more time to get to the rational prefrontal cortex. Seriously, just counting to ten before doing something impulsive can make all the difference in the world.

The very last part of the brain to get myelinated is the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reason, planning, and deliberation. So while teenage emotions have gone into hyperdrive, reason and logic are still obeying the speed limit. The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex.

Synaptogenesis and myelination take place over years. A kid may be capable and competent one day, and a total, catastrophic mess the next. She will be perfectly able to reason in a rational and mature fashion in first-period science class, but by the end of the school day, she may devolve into a weepy, frustrated mess. Adolescent brain development is messy and imperfect when viewed day to day, but in the bigger picture, progress is being made. Just step back a little. Be patient with the short-term outages and be grateful for what’s functional on any given day.

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect." —Daniel Coyle

My memories Think faster Than speed of sound Faster than speed of light My axonless neurons Use myelinated phosphons Nor photons Nand electrons Nund neutrons

This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By

In your body, the gradually accumulating burden of reactive experiences is called allostatic load, which increases inflammation, weakens your immune system, and wears on your cardiovascular system. In your brain, allostatic load causes neurons to atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, the center of top-down executive control; in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory; and in other regions. It impairs myelination, the insulating of neural fibers to speed along their signals, which can weaken the connectivity between different regions of your brain, so they don’t work together as well as they should.

Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell.” Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories (New York: Anchor, 2008), p. 30–31.

However, as pruning and myelination proceed, the child’s brain becomes more efficient as it locks down into its adult configuration. This lockdown process happens in different parts of the brain at different times, and each lockdown is potentially the end of a sensitive period. It’s like cement hardening: If you try to draw your name in very wet cement, it will disappear quickly. If you wait until the cement is dry, you’ll leave no mark. But if you can catch it while it’s in the transition between wet and dry, your name will last forever.[2]

Rate of myelination in different brain areas The various brain areas begin and end myelination at different ages. For example, visual areas finish myelinating by six months. At that age an infant can see an object moving through space as a homogeneous object; before that, it’s just a collection of disconnected colors and edges. Watch babies wave a toy back and forth in front of their eyes. This rehearsal wires up the visual areas so they can begin to recognize and track objects. Over and over, the same groups of neurons fire together, forming visual functional groups that eventually work together well enough to let the baby recognize familiar objects. Babies’ other senses work along with sight to help form a mental image of objects. Here’s one study that continues to astonish me every time I think about it: Newborns, still in the hospital, were given pacifiers to suck. There were several different shapes: square, round, pointed. Large models of all the different-shaped pacifiers were hung above their cribs. The babies stared longest at the pacifier that matched the one that had been in their mouth. These infants appeared able to relate the mental image created with touch — what was in their mouths — with the one created with vision — what was dangling above their heads. I remember the first time our oldest daughter saw a book. She was about three months old — barely able to sit up — and we put a cardboard book with very simple pictures of toys in front of her. Instantly she put her face right above the book, and she inspected every square inch of the page from about an inch away. Then she sat back up and slapped the pages all over. We could almost see her brain working: “What is this? It’s flat but it reminds me a lot of the things I see around me.” She combined the senses of touch and sight together to examine a new phenomenon in her world. Speech begins with babbling at around six months of age. I remember our youngest daughter beginning speech by mimicking the up and down flow of the sentence before she began to make individual sounds. The flow of speech is supported by language centers in the right hemisphere; the details of speech are supported by language centers in the left hemisphere. Our daughter was practicing how to talk, using the brain areas that were currently available. Her right hemisphere appeared to mature before her left hemisphere. As the speech areas develop and these groups become more extensively coordinated, the child’s speech becomes clearer and connected. The auditory areas finish myelinating by two years. The child now has the brain foundation for speech production. She can distinguish the individual sounds that make up words, and can begin to string words together into phrases and sentences. The motor system is myelinated by four years. Before that, children are very slow to respond. Have you ever played catch with a three-year-old? He holds out his arms, the ball hits his chest, it falls on the ground — and then he closes his arms. It takes so long for the message to move from his eyes to his brain, from his brain to the spinal cord, and finally from his spinal cord to his arms, that he misses the ball. You can practice with him all you like, but his reactions won’t speed up until his motor system myelinates.

The corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the cortex, myelinates from 7 to 10 years of age. At age 10, a child’s thinking speeds up noticeably. Ask seven-year-olds a question and it will take a long time for them to respond. Sometimes you can almost see the question move up to the brain and the answer go slowly back down to the mouth. This really became clear to me at our dining table. Our family knows seven different graces to say before meals, and each of our three daughters wanted to choose grace. So we suggested that each daughter could choose grace before breakfast, before lunch, or before dinner. Our youngest daughter, then age six, chose grace before lunch. Lunch is the shortest meal time — we have to walk home, eat, clean up, and walk back to school. Every lunch when we asked her what grace we should say, she would be absolutely quiet for a very long time. She would look around the room, furl her brows, obviously thinking hard, and then announce which grace to say — and it was always the same one. I got a little angry. Was this a power trip? Was she trying to control us? After all, we couldn’t eat until she chose a grace. I finally realized that, because her corpus callosum connecting her left and the right hemispheres was not fully myelinated, the signal was going very slowly back and forth in considering which of the seven graces to say. She was thinking as fast as her brain would allow. The teenage brain The last connections to mature are those between the front and the back of the brain; these connections begin to myelinate at age 12 and continue through age 25. The back of the brain is the concrete present. Environmental stimuli from the senses activate the back of the brain, where a picture of the world is created, like a movie on a screen. This picture is then sent to the front of the brain, the executive centers — the “CEO” or boss of the brain. The frontal lobes place the concrete present — what is happening right now — in the larger context of past and future, plans, goals, and values. Even though teenagers may look like adults, their brains are still maturing. The teen’s brain, whose frontal connections are not fully myelinated, is like a company whose CEO is on vacation. Each department is moving full speed ahead without the benefit of knowing the big picture. Teens are very passionate; they are engulfed by their ideas. They can generate a plan that takes into account their immediate circumstances, but they don’t see the bigger picture.

Culturally responsive teaching is also about empowerment and interrupting teaching practices that keep certain students dependent learners. We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving.

Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.

As psychologists, Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice works; they’re just identifying it as an effective behavior. In the intervening decades since Ericsson’s first major papers on the topic, however, neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill.

Sleep, scientists have learned, is the most important phase in the body’s cycle of cellular repair. The glymphatic system—which helps the brain flush away toxic cellular waste—accelerates. In mice, myelin—a fatty substance that protects nerve fibers and facilitates communication between neurons—regenerates. Human growth hormone—involved in growth in children and various metabolic processes in adults—pours out of the pituitary gland.

Time is brain and with each passing minute 1.9 million neurons, 14 billion synapses and 12km (7.5 miles) of myelinated fibres are destroyed. This equates to the premature ‘ageing’ of the brain to the tune of 3.6 years for each hour without reperfusion treatment.12

This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.

myelin

That’s a great way to be in regular life. But if you’re making a song? And you’re making music and there is going to be passion in it and there is going to be anger in it? You have to go to the myelin sheath—you know, to the central nervous system—for it to be good, I feel like. And if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted my fucking life and ruined everything...

Circuits, Nerves And Myelin: At The End Of The Day, Neuroplasticity Is All You Need To Stay In Business

This second wave of synaptogenesis is not confined to the frontal lobes. When the UCLA team scanned the brains of nineteen normal children and adolescents, ages seven and sixteen, they found that the parietal lobes (which integrate information from far-flung neighborhoods of the brain, such as auditory, tactile, and visual signals) are still maturing through the midteens. The long nerve fibers called white matter are probably still being sheathed in myelin, the fatty substance that lets nerves transmit signals faster and more efficiently. As a result, circuits that make sense of disparate information are works in progress through age sixteen or so. The parietal lobes reach their gray matter peak at age ten (in girls) or twelve (in boys) and are then pruned. But the temporal lobes, seats of language as well as emotional control, do not reach their gray matter maximum until age sixteen, Giedd finds. Only then do they undergo pruning. The teen brain, it seems, reprises one of the most momentous acts of infancy, the overproduction and then pruning of neuronal branches. “The brain,” says Sowell, “undergoes dynamic changes much later than we originally thought.

This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

These increases in brain cholesterol and pituitary activity were clues that were rich in their implications, and in the late 1960’s a research team at the University of California at Berkeley began to look for specific differences in the neural structures of gentled and ungentled rats. They found that greater tactile stimulation resulted in the following differences: These animals’ brains were heavier, and in particular they had heavier and thicker cerebral cortexes. This heaviness was not due only to the presence of more cholesterol—that is, more myeline sheaths—but also to the fact that actual neural cell bodies and nuclei were larger. Associated with these larger cells were greater quantities of cholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase, two enzymes that support the chemical activities of nerve cells, and also a higher ratio of RNA to DNA within the cells. Increased amounts of these specific compounds indicates higher metabolic activity. Measurements of the synaptic junctions connecting nerve cells revealed that these junctions were 50% larger in cross-section in the gentled rats than in the isolated ones. The gentled rats’ adrenal glands were also markedly heavier, evidence that the pituitary-adrenal axis—the most important monitor of the body’s hormonal secretions—was indeed more active.34 Many other studies have confirmed and added to these findings. Laboratory animals who are given rich tactile experience in their infancy grow faster, have heavier brains, more highly developed myelin sheaths, bigger nerve cells, more advanced skeletal muscular growth, better coordination, better immunological resistance, more developed pituitary/adrenal activity, earlier puberties, and more active sex lives than their isolated genetic counterparts. Associated with these physiological advantages are a host of emotional and behavioral responses which indicate a stronger and much more successfully adapted organism. The gentled rats are much calmer and less excitable, yet they tend to be more dominant in social and sexual situations. They are more lively, more curious, more active problem solvers. They are more willing to explore new environments (ungentled animals usually withdraw fearfully from novel situations), and advance more quickly in all forms of conditioned learning exercises.35 Moreover, these felicitous changes are not to be observed only in infancy and early maturation; an enriched environment will produce exactly the same increases in brain and adrenal weights and the same behavioral changes in adult animals as well, even though the adults require a longer period of stimulation to show the maximum effect.36

I really do hope myeline meant something in the end- that it meant all those things. I don't know what's next- what any of us can expect- but I do know I'm ready to see what's out there for me.

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect." ~Daniel Coyle

Since we are talking about autistic children, let’s start there, and then we will circle back and focus on treating people with PTSD. Dr. Porges: We can cluster both PTSD and autism together, because from a Polyvagal perspective, the pivotal point is whether we can help another human feel safe. Safety is a powerful construct that involves features from several processes and domains, including context, behavior, mental processes, and physiological state. If we feel safe, we have access to the neural regulation of the facial muscles. We have access to a myelinated vagal circuit that is capable of down-regulating the commonly observed fight/flight and stress responses. And, when we down-regulate our defense, we have an opportunity to play and to enjoy our social interactions. I wanted to introduce into this discussion the concept of play. An inability to play is a characteristic of many individuals with a psychiatric diagnosis. Yet, we do not find an inability to play with others or to spontaneously and reciprocally express humor in any diagnostic criteria.

Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But what I saw was not patience, exactly. It was more like probing, strategic impatience. The master coaches I met were constantly changing their input. If A didn't work, they tried B and C; if they failed, the rest of the alphabet was holstered and ready. What seemed like patient repetition from the outside was actually, on closer examination, a series of subtle variations, each one a distinct firing, each one creating a worthwhile combination of errors and fixes that grew myelin.

Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals.

Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement. Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.

This is not to say that being born late into a big family automatically makes someone fast, any more than having a parent die early in life automatically makes one prime minister of England. But it does say that being fast, like any talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and that are directly related to the intense, subconscious reaction to motivational signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and thus grow myelin.

We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving. Just turning up the rigor of instruction or increasing the complexity of content will not stimulate brain growth. Instead, challenge and stretch come with learning the moves to do more strategic thinking and information processing.

Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice—the longer you stay in the Clarissa zone, firing the right signals through your circuits—the more skill you get, or, to put it a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn. All skill acquisitions, and therefore all talent hotbeds, operate on the same principles of action, no matter how different they may appear to us. As Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist and myelin researcher, put it, “All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.

to paint a vivid picture of what deep practice feels like. It's the feeling, in short, of being a staggering baby, of intently, clumsily lurching toward a goal and toppling over. It's a wobbly, discomfiting sensation that any sensible person would instinctively seek to avoid. Yet the longer the babies remained in that state—the more willing they were to endure it, and to permit themselves to fail—the more myelin they built, and the more skill they earned. The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles. The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition. In a few chapters we'll discuss the likely evolutionary reasons, but for now we'll simply note that deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate. Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated. If you moved to China, your myelin would wrap fibers that help you conjugate Mandarin verbs. To put it another way, myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do. Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

We are myelin beings,” Bartzokis says finally. “It's the way we're built. You can't avoid it.

By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.

To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition. These elements help build neural pathways and activate myelination. They help neurons fire and wire together in ways that make learning “sticky.” Collectivist cultures use social interactions such as conversation and storytelling as learning aids. Because of society’s history of segregation and unequal educational opportunities, many communities of color continue to use the natural learning modalities in the home and community. As a result, their neural pathways are primed to learn using story, art, movement, and music.

The perception of one's own body precedes that of the other. It is a system that develops in time... First, there is an interoceptive body. The exteroceptivity can only exert itself in collaboration with interoceptivity. It is a buccal body and a respiratory body. In the following stage, the child perceives regions tied to excretion functions. Interoceptive organs come to serve exteroceptive organs until there is a soldering between the two domains. It is only between three and six months that the soldering between external and internal (myelination) occurs. While this soldering is not realized, perception is not possible, because the body must equilibrize itself for perception to work. No total body schema yet exists...Consciousness of one's own body is first of all fragmentary.

potentials is accelerated by their strong myelination. Myelin insulation not only speeds up spike transmission velocity but also protects axons from conduction failure, reduces the cross-talk from neighboring axons, and allows for transmission of much higher frequency pulses per unit time than thinner, unmyelinated fibers.

Recently, we uncovered an important mechanism by which a month of mindfulness meditation (about 11 hours of practice, 0.5 per day, 5 days a week) improves attention and self-regulation (Tang et al 2010; 2012). This mechanism is a change in the white matter that conducts signals into and out of the anterior cingulate gyrus. The anterior cingulate is an important part of the system by which we can voluntarily regulate behavior. After two weeks of meditation the improvements seemed to involve the number of fibers conducting information. This improvement was related to more positive and less negative mood self-reports. After 4 weeks of meditation improvement in white matter involved changes in the myelin that provides insulation to the fibers and thus further increases the efficiency of the network involved in self-regulation.

The consequences of these peculiarities are remarkable. Lack of myelin insulation and lack of blood-brain barrier allow signals from the body to interact with neural signals directly. In no way can interoception be regarded as a plain perceptual representation of the body inside the nervous system. There is, rather, an extensive commingling of signals.

The first peculiarity of interoception is a pervasive lack of myelin insulation in a majority of interoceptive neurons. Typical neurons have a cell body and an axon, the latter being the “cable” that leads to the synapse. In turn the synapse makes contact with the next neuron and either permits or withholds its activity. The result is the firing of the neuron or its silence. Myelin serves as an insulator of the axon cable, preventing extraneous chemical and bioelectrical contacts. In the absence of myelin, however, molecules in the surround of an axon interact with it and alter its firing potential. Moreover, other neurons can make synaptic contacts along the axon rather than at the neuron’s synapse, giving rise to what is known as non-synaptic signaling. These operations are neurally impure; they are not really separate from the body that hosts them.