You've probably all heard the term neuroplasticity, and yet it's kind of hard to actually understand how you can influence the actual plastic brain in your everyday life.

And so I have the guy, the brilliant professor Richard Davidson,

giving us those kind of nuggets that really help you translate science from page to stage.

And I just love those.

He's talking about the relationships

we have with our infants, what happens when you have negative beliefs and how we can help

shift those negative beliefs in ourselves, in our children, in our adolescence. And the most

important nugget is a five minute a day protocol. If you do it

every single day, it actually changes your brain. Five minutes a day, even the busiest of us can do.

So I love when research is actually able to be applied to our

real lives. I'm Dr. Eliza Pressman and this is Raising Good Humans podcast. Okay, so I want to start with

neuroplasticity. What is it? What is it really?

Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change in response to experience and in response to

training. And one of the things I often say is that neuroplasticity happens wittingly or unwittingly.

Well, most of the time neuroplasticity happens unwittingly.

Most of the time we are not actually aware of how our brains are being literally sculpted, shaped, and hijacked, if you will, by all the

forces around us. And the invitation in our work and in this new book, Born to Flourish,

is simply that we can take more responsibility for our own neuroplasticity,

for our own brain, and direct the brain in healthy directions, as opposed to allowing it to be

just randomly influenced willy-nilly by the forces around us.

Okay, so before we get into how to do that, which we definitely will, can you help us understand

how you came to understand neuroplasticity?

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