You Can Learn New Habits Very Fast: Brain Circuits Rewire Faster With Urgency

We’ve all heard “it takes 21 days to form a new habit,” and other times we hear it’s 30 days or 60 days.

The truth is this: neural circuits will rewire at a rate that is proportional to how urgent the new behavior is.

Now, of course, there are skills (physical, language, music, etc.) that need time in order to form. That’s a different form of neuroplasticity. But it’s also one that can be accelerated. It involves focus, errors (which are the signal for neural circuits to change), reflection on those errors later and quality sleep, especially in the two nights that follow the attempt to learn a new skill.

On the episode of the Huberman Lab podcast out now, my guest is Dr. Poppy Crum (yes, that’s her actual given name!). She’s a neuroscientist, professor at Stanford and former Chief of Research at Dolby Labs.

We discussed rewiring your brain circuits by using different tools, and we discussed that in the context of habit formation and new skill development. Excitingly, Poppy shares how you can use simple video of a skill you’re trying to learn and zero-cost AI to get critical, elite-level feedback and thereby learn that skill faster.

She generously provided instructions for how to use AI for different health and learning purposes. They’re in the caption of the episode and they are easy to use and free.

And we discussed how to use zero-cost technologies to control your home environment for healthier and better living.