“With neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be.”
That was Eileen Gu’s answer when a reporter asked her during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics whether she thinks before she speaks. Gu explained that she spends a great deal of time thinking, journals regularly and examines her own thought processes. What made the answer spread far beyond the interview was the idea behind those words: that the way we think is not necessarily fixed, and that changing how we think can change who we become.
Gu was speaking about her own approach, not presenting a scientific conclusion. But the science behind the word she used is fascinating. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s capacity to adapt to experience by changing aspects of its structure and function. Research shows that the adult brain can remain capable of experience dependent change, including measurable structural changes associated with intensive learning.
That matters because we often think about learning as something that happens to the brain. We learn a language, a skill or a new way of doing something, and imagine that the information is simply being stored. Neuroplasticity offers a different picture. Learning can also be accompanied by changes in the brain itself.
The brain pays attention to what we practice
Not every experience leaves the same mark. Research on experience dependent plasticity points to the importance of repetition, specificity, intensity, timing and salience. Attention also plays a major role in determining what we learn from an experience. In simple terms, what we repeatedly practice and what we consider important receive more of the brain’s learning machinery than something we barely notice.
This is where repetition becomes more interesting than the usual advice to “stay consistent.”
A skill is not transformed by one dramatic effort. It is shaped by what is done again and again. A person who repeatedly practices speaking in public is not simply collecting more presentations. They are repeatedly engaging the processes involved in that behaviour. A person who keeps learning a language is not simply memorising vocabulary. They are repeatedly asking the brain to recognise, retrieve and use a different system of communication.
One of the most striking demonstrations came from an unlikely group: London taxi drivers. Researchers comparing licensed taxi drivers with London bus drivers found differences in hippocampal gray matter, and within the taxi drivers, years of navigation experience were associated with differences in hippocampal volume. The study linked those differences to the demanding spatial knowledge required to navigate the city rather than simply to driving or stress.
Experience, in other words, was not just something the drivers had. It was part of what helped shape the brain that performed the experience.
You are not too old to become someone new
We often talk about age as though it gradually closes the door on learning. But the adult brain does not simply stop adapting because we grow older. It may become harder to learn some things, and the way the brain responds to training can change with age, but the capacity for change remains. Research on adult neuroplasticity continues to show that new experiences and sustained practice can produce measurable changes in the brain.
One study makes this surprisingly tangible. Researchers gave 134 adults between 64 and 76 years old, none of whom had previous musical training, six months of piano instruction. Brain scans taken before and after the programme showed increases in cortical thickness in several auditory regions in the piano group compared with the comparison group. Simply put, even at this age, learning something new could still change their brain.
learning something new could still change their brain.
They were not children starting piano lessons. They were adults learning something new much later in life. That is what makes neuroplasticity so interesting. Getting older may change how we learn, but it does not mean we stop becoming capable of learning.
The person you can become may be practiced too
This leads somewhere more interesting than neuroscience.
We usually speak about personality as though it is something we discover; I am shy. I am not disciplined. I am not creative. I am just not good at speaking in front of people.
But psychology is beginning to give more room to the possibility that some aspects of personality can change.
A 2024 systematic review examined 30 longitudinal studies involving 7,719 participants and found that interventions could promote desired changes in personality traits. The researchers were careful about the limits of the evidence, and simply wanting to change was not enough on its own. But the findings did suggest that some enduring traits are more malleable than the old idea of a fixed personality would suggest.
That distinction matters.
Wanting to become more confident is not the same as becoming confident. Wanting to become more disciplined is not the same as developing disciplined behaviours. Change appears to depend on what happens after the intention: the repeated behaviours, the environments, the feedback and the experiences that reinforce the direction of change.
Perhaps that is why a line from Chris Williamson fits so naturally into this conversation:
“The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year looks the same.”
The connection to neuroplasticity is not that discipline magically rewires the brain overnight. It is that repetition is what makes practice meaningful. The ordinary things we do repeatedly may matter precisely because they are ordinary.
Maybe identity is less fixed than we think
This brings us back to what Eileen Gu was really getting at.
Her statement can sound like an extreme promise: I can become exactly who I want to be. Science does not support the idea that human beings can simply become anything they imagine. Neuroplasticity has limits, and the brain does not change in unlimited or identical ways for everyone.
But there is a more grounded idea inside her statement. We may have more influence over who we become than the language of fixed identity suggests. The question is no longer simply, Who am I? It can also be, What am I repeatedly practicing? Am I practicing patience or impatience? Curiosity or avoidance? Speaking up or staying silent? Learning or remaining comfortable?
Because repetition does more than build skills. Over time, it helps shape habits, behaviour and the ways we respond to the world. Who we become is shaped less by the person we believe we are, and more by the person we keep practicing to be.
References:
O’Bleness, C. (2026, February 24). Eileen Gu’s Most Viral Press Moments From the Milan Cortina Games. Sports Illustrated Lifestyle. https://lifestyle.si.com/news/eileen-gu-most-viral-press-moments-milan-cortina-games
Lövdén, M., Wenger, E., Johan, M., Ulman, L., & Lars, B. (2013). Structural brain plasticity in adult learning and development. CNTRICS: Modeling Psychosis Related Cognition in Animal Systems to Enhance Translational Research + Life-Span Plasticity of Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, 37(9, Part B), 2296–2310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.02.014
Kleim, J. A., & Jones, T. A. (2008). Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity: Implications for Rehabilitation After Brain Damage. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51(1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2008/018)
Maguire, E. A., Woollett, K., & Spiers, H. J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091–1101. https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.20233
Cleveland Clinic. (2023, March 19). Grey Matter. Cleveland Clinic; Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24831-grey-matter
Haehner, P., Wright, A. J., & Wiebke Bleidorn. (2024). A systematic review of volitional personality change research. Communications Psychology, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00167-5
Thomas, C., & Baker, C. I. (2013). Teaching an adult brain new tricks: A critical review of evidence for training-dependent structural plasticity in humans. NeuroImage, 73, 225–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.069
Worschech, F., Altenmüller, E., Jünemann, K., Sinke, C., Krüger, T. H. C., Scholz, D. S., Müller, C. A. H., Kliegel, M., James, C. E., & Marie, D. (2022). Evidence of cortical thickness increases in bilateral auditory brain structures following piano learning in older adults. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1513(1), 21–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14762