Neuroplasticity Light Switch Intervention by Johannes Faupel
Neuroplasticity Explained Simply – The Story of the Temporarily Missing Light Switch
Neural Plasticity: How clients can change their thought and behavioral patterns with simple imagery. An invitation to the brain.
Imagine you have been coming home to your dark apartment for years. Unfortunately, when building the house, the electrician forgot to install a light switch next to the entrance door. As a result, you grope your way through the hallway every night. The light switch is only at the end.
You often stumble because of this.
My question here and in counseling sessions is:
Is an apartment mentally disturbed because it lacks a light switch at the entrance?
Of course, an apartment cannot be disturbed. This is a metaphor, a comparison. The image of the apartment is meant to build a bridge for clients in counseling to their own lives.
What Does the Story of the Apartment Have to Do with Neuroplasticity?
The metaphor of the light switch refers to associations and neural connections in the brain. The dark apartment symbolically represents an everyday situation in which a person feels “in the dark” (alone, clueless, helpless, powerless).
However, they are not powerless. They are also not helpless. It only feels that way because no helpful experience for a specific situation has been established yet.
The crucial difference and the way out of the “darkness” of the moment are the existing resources, strengths, experiences, relationships, etc., that this person has available: if they can see them. In the apartment (the intervention metaphor), it is initially dark. The path to the light (analogous to thoughts leading to a solution) was arduous.
How This Story of the Apartment Can Show the Way to One’s Own Resources
I continue in counseling: If you do not consider this apartment a hopelessly disturbed “case” due to a missing switch, whom would you call (if money were no object) to solve the problem with the light switch?
An electrician should come and install a light switch! That is the obvious answer.
And the Brain? What Can a Person Do for Themselves with Their Brain?
Again, the electrician image helps. In the case of the apartment, it is “quite clear.” The handyman comes, lays the wiring, and installs a switch on the wall.
And the brain? For the brain, it is much easier to install a neural switch to light – that is, a mental connection to resources in the midst of a crisis (darkness) – than it is for the electrician in the apartment.
There is no noise, no dirt, no drilling, and no hammering.
Assignment and Invitation to the Brain
In counseling sessions, I then invite clients to imagine a situation that feels like being in a dark hallway. And how helpful it is to simply turn on the light: to mentally and emotionally get out of the situation and help themselves.
At This Point, the Story of the Apartment Ends. And a New Story for the Clients Begins.
In counseling, we talk for a moment about how the brain can develop helpful neural switches from suggested associations within seconds. Some people then become pensive. You can almost see the gears turning in their heads. To enhance the effect even further, I ask what shape the switch has and what material it is made of.
As an additional reinforcement, one could, for instance, grasp the belt buckle and internalize this as a symbolic light switch activation. The more data points the brain has, the stronger and faster the intervention works in everyday life.
Why Do I Ask About the Nature and Composition of the Imagined Light Switch in the Head?
The imagined light switch is a resource switch. When clients give their own “design” to the metaphor, it becomes their own story and reality, no longer my intervention.
How Does This Intervention Work?
Quickly. It works quickly because it is immediately intuitive and very simple. Turning on a light switch is one of the trivial processes of everyday life. You don’t need to learn it or even remember it.
Through this image of the light switch, clients establish a strong connection to their own resources: situations in which they feel safe and strong. These situations correspond to the light in the previously dark hallway.
A recognized simple action from everyday life connects in one’s imagination and soon also in one’s habit with a situation that used to be considered difficult to change. Through this change, it becomes factually easy to access resources. The experiences show just that.
How Can You Apply This Story to Your Everyday Life?
Ask yourself what “your dark hallway” might be. And then imagine how your brain automatically creates a direct connection from burdensome situations to your greatest strengths…
- Critical Periods: Time frames during which neuroplasticity is especially robust, important in understanding learning during childhood.
- Experience-Dependent Plasticity: Changes in the brain that occur as a result of experiences, particularly emphasizing the role of enriched environments.
- Hebbian Learning: A principle that explains the strengthening of synaptic connections based on simultaneous activation, often summarized as “cells that fire together, wire together.”
- Neurogenesis: The process of new neurons being formed, particularly in the hippocampus, related to neuroplasticity and memory.
- Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF): A protein that supports the survival of neurons and is linked to neuroplasticity and learning.
- Neural Connections: The networks in the brain that can be strengthened or newly formed through neuroplasticity to enable behavioral changes.
- Synaptic Plasticity: The ability of synapses to change their strength and efficiency, crucial for learning processes and memory formation.
- Cognitive Flexibility: The ability to switch thinking processes and adapt to new or unexpected situations, an important feature of neuroplasticity.
- Behavioral Patterns: Recurring response behaviors that can be consciously changed and reshaped through neuroplasticity.
- Neurons: The nerve cells in the brain that are influenced in their connectivity and functionality by neuroplastic processes.
- Motor Learning: The process of movement optimization through repetition and neuroplastic adaptation, important for rehabilitation and athletic performance.
- Mindfulness: A practice that has been shown to promote neuroplastic changes by establishing new neural pathways for calm and focus.
- Self-Efficacy: The confidence in one’s ability to overcome challenges, reinforced by positive neuroplastic changes.
- Long-Term Potentiation (LTP): A neurophysiological mechanism that enables the strengthening of synapses and is considered the basis for long-term learning.
- Habituation: The adaptation to recurring stimuli, a simple example of neuroplastic adjustment in the brain.