I have been interested in the idea of neuroplasticity for a while now. It seems to be a very positive idea about the brain. The brain can rewire - sometimes very quickly - to handle new experiences and sets of stimuli. This is part of the physical realisation of the learning process.
To find out more I have started reading Livewired by David Eagleman It is a very engaging book with great examples to illustrate the ideas. One of those ideas is effectively 'Use it or lose it'. Our sensory inputs map to specific regions in our cortex. Parts of our bodies that are close together (like 2 points on your skin separated by a few millimetres) tend to map to similar or very close regions in the cortex. This leads to the idea of a Homunculus or little human inside our brains which maps to the parts of our bodies.
In people who lose a limb their cortical real estate has been shown to be reassigned or colonised by their neighbours. This can lead to heightened capabilities in people with some form of sensory loss like blindness. But it also means that we lose cortex for those skills which we don't use. When we need them they are gone. But maybe not completely.
I have recently started to refresh my old maths skills from college. It is 33 years since I finished my maths degree and have not used advanced maths much in my jobs. So it might seem that it would all be lost and I would have to relearn everything. But in fact I am finding that much of what I am doing is refreshing old knowledge a thin imprint of which seems to be still there in my mind. For concepts which are proving difficult I wonder how well I undrestood them back in college.
I don't really want to be able to do complex maths on a day to day basis, but this is really part of a larger project of giving myself as many thinking tools as possible.
Several years ago I decided to learn some lisp style programming. Lisp languages are very different in form to other languages like java and python. Programming languages provide a way to map concepts to code that a machine can understand. The variety in languages is not purely based on syntax, but can be more profound. For example Java was based on C++. Broadly speaking they are similar types of Object Oriented languages. Java tried to fix many of the important shortcomings of C++. Other languages however are more profoundly different. Lisp languages are of this separate type, and a language like assembler which is very low level is also very different to the OO languages mentioned.
Although I decided not to continue learning lisp style programming I found that the experience lead me to think differently about problems that I was trying to solve. And not just in software. This idea of using learning to 'change your mind' is what I am trying to do with the refresh of my maths and science background.