Neuroplasticity: how the brain rewires itself

Neuroplasticity is your brain’s ability to reorganize itself over a lifetime, not just in childhood, by strengthening, weakening, or forming connections between neurons. It happens in response to learning, practice, environmental change, and recovery from injury. This adaptability is why skills get easier with repetition and some functions can shift to healthy tissue after damage.

How does the brain actually rewire itself?

Every thought, sensation, and action fires signals along specific networks of neurons. Per a 2023 overview in StatPearls, the nervous system reorganizes its own structure, functions, and connections in response to what you do. Pathways you use often get stronger and ones you rarely use weaken and prune away, the biology behind the popular shorthand “cells that fire together wire together.” After an injury like a stroke, some functions can even shift to healthy tissue nearby.

What’s the best evidence that adult brains can change?

A landmark 2000 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is still one of the most cited examples. Researchers scanned the brains of London taxi drivers, who spend years memorizing the city’s tangled street layout to earn a license. Their posterior hippocampus, a hub for memory and spatial navigation, was measurably larger than in non-drivers. The longer someone had been driving, the bigger the difference, a hint that the training itself reshaped the brain rather than the reverse.

Is neuroplasticity always a good thing?

Not necessarily, and it’s worth saying plainly. The same StatPearls overview makes room for both outcomes: regaining function after a stroke is the beneficial kind, while anxious or pain-related patterns that get more automatic the more they’re repeated are the harmful kind. Neuroplasticity itself is neutral machinery, and the direction depends on what you practice.

How does neuroplasticity relate to EMDR and bilateral stimulation?

EMDR’s own theory, the Adaptive Information Processing model, holds that distressing memories can get “stuck” in a way that keeps triggering present-day reactions. That idea is close to what researchers call memory reconsolidation: how a memory can change each time it’s activated. A 2013 review in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research rounded up over a decade of neuroimaging studies reporting brain-activity and structural changes after EMDR. Most of the underlying studies are small, though, and researchers say the findings need larger replications.

Bilateral stimulation, the left-right rhythm at the center of EMDR, is the mechanism under closest study. Our review of what happens in the brain during EMDR covers it in more depth. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the guided version of this practice for everyday stress at app.emease.com.