That the brain learns to learn throughout childhood is, admittedly, an odd concept to get your head around. As well as having to learn the very basics such as walking and talking in our first couple of years there was just so much to learn before we even got anywhere near stepping through the school gates – at which point intense learning became the “normal” state of affairs, both in the playground and the classroom, as we were regularly confronted with and tested by situations that took us out of our comfort zone. This happened not just in lessons, but also outside of formal learning times, as we navigated the twists and turns of learning how to get on with other people in all aspects of life. It could have been when practising sports skills, trying to work out the unfathomable rules of attraction or negotiating our way through daily social exchanges with family, friends, strangers and those regarded as arch enemies. Feeling out of your depth at that stage in life might not be particularly pleasant, but it's nonetheless a familiar, if not daily, occurrence. And it's relatively easy to deal with when everybody else is in the same boat.

      In adulthood, however, we have more freedom of choice and can exert much more free will over what we will and will not spend our time doing. Not surprisingly this means that we tend to gravitate towards activities that we are good at, enjoy doing or at least remain squarely within our comfort zone; “set‐pieces” that through repetition have become so well known to our brains that we barely register how we're doing whatever we're doing.

      Unfortunately, this means we become more and more unfamiliar with the feeling of struggling to grasp a new idea or skill. Out of practice in dealing with such feelings, we either don't engage with it fully or try to dodge it entirely. It's human nature to be drawn towards activities that increase our sense of well‐being and to be repelled by those that decrease it. Alas, in doing this, we inevitably turn ourselves into set‐piece specialists. In fact, most people spend their entire adult lives doing things they have done many times before because those activities can be done with the least amount of cognitive effort and the smallest possibility of generating feelings of inadequacy.

      We like to operate on autopilot because it's less hassle, less stressful and tends to reduce anxiety. The problem is that the easiest route in the short term is rarely the best path in the long run. And if there's one weakness that we humans often fall foul of, it's our tendency to choose the immediate, easy reward and worry about any long‐term drawbacks later (or better still, never).

      Sign here

      See if you can do something that you've done many times before, probably without thinking about it, but this time do it slightly differently.

      Try signing your name really slowly.

      Difficult, isn't it!? That's a motor “set‐piece” right there – an automatic action made inaccurate by too much thought.

Bring it on!

      Throughout most of human history, becoming a set‐piece specialist was absolutely fine. You spent childhood learning the basics, adolescence becoming a cog in some machine or another and adulthood winding that cog via a repertoire of set‐pieces in a job for life, putting food on the table to feed hungry mouths who themselves would, in turn, go through more or less the same life transitions.

      The world, however, has changed since those days. The world has always been changing but, as we humans have become more and more adept at controlling and manipulating the environment around us, that rate of change has steadily accelerated. This has certainly been the case since the Industrial Revolution, when machines started getting involved. The changes used to only really be noticeable from one generation to the next. Then, during the 20th century – when great technological leaps impacting daily life started happening more regularly – they became readily apparent from one decade to the next.

Now, in the 21st century, everything has gone and sped up again! New innovations are continually impacting on the way we work, how we socialize, how we raise children, what we do for entertainment and how we think – fast, continuous, unprecedented change that is influencing every aspect of our lives. This increases the environmental pressure on our brains to adapt and keep up with the breakneck pace.

      But fear not, your brain is more than up to all this. If there's one thing above all others that is most impressive about your brain, it's the degree to which it can change to adapt to all the new challenges that will inevitably crop up. This is exactly the feature that made us humans the most dominant species on the planet in the first place.

      We are incredibly adaptable. Our brains will gradually change to serve us better in any given environment. Our collective ingenuity has led to the development of a variety of tools with which we can sculpt our environment. By creating new environments and carefully choosing which environments we immerse ourselves in on a regular basis, we can in fact change our own brains. It may sound miraculous. It is!

      Rising IQs

      IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient and is the world's most popular and well‐known intelligence test. Up until the end of the 20th century the broadly held assumption was that once a person hit adulthood their IQ score would remain stable for the rest of their life. Then along came an ingenious Kiwi psychologist by the name of James Flynn, who noticed something curious. When he compared IQ scores of the same people, from one IQ test to the next taken a few years later, they'd gone up. We now know that IQ scores around the world have increased by an average of three IQ points every ten years!

      What is driving this increase in intelligence? As far as we can tell it is driven by an increase in consumption of information and the extensive use of a steady flow of new technologies. From decade to decade the amount of information we have access to has dramatically increased, first via television and then through the internet. The more information our brains have to juggle on a daily basis, it seems, the higher our IQs go!

Finding flow

      To get the best performance out of your brain, you should bear in mind what modern neuroscience has taught us are the rules of the game. Your brain will physically rewire the connections between brain areas involved in any regularly used mental ability so that the interactions between them are: