Human Capacity Architecture after twenty-five

You can't choose most of what life throws at you, but you can shape the brain you face it with.

Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change in response to its environment. For many years, scientists believed that we lost this plasticity as adults. However, as understanding of the brain advanced, we began to understand how wrong that model was!

In a study published in 2000, a team at University College London compared brain scans of 16 licensed London taxi drivers, aged 32 to 62, with scans of men of similar ages who didn't drive taxis. To earn their licence, the drivers had spent an average of two years memorising the city's streets, a training drivers call 'The Knowledge'. The back of the drivers' hippocampus, a region involved in spatial memory, was larger than the controls', and the front of it was smaller. The longer a man had worked as a taxi driver, the larger the back of his right hippocampus was. The researchers concluded that the healthy adult brain seems capable of local structural change in response to the demands placed on it.¹

I start there because most of what I've written about Human Capacity Architecture™ (HCA) has been about young adults, and that emphasis is easy to misread. The Threshold Programme works with 16- to 25-year-olds because the prefrontal cortex, which supports planning, impulse control, and judging risks and rewards, doesn't fully mature until a person's twenties,² and I think those are the years when deliberate development pays off most. However, development continues after that window narrows. The taxi drivers in Maguire’s study were working adults, and because the differences were larger in men who had driven for longer, the researchers concluded they were most likely acquired through learning The Knowledge as adults, rather than inborn.¹

This is exciting because most of us adults want, and need, to keep developing well past the 16-25 window, often because something has made it necessary. We want to live our best lives, and because life changes, our brains need to change to meet it, whether it’s running a business that has outgrown the way we run it, learning a new sport, or facing a redundancy, a bereavement, or a diagnosis that requires us to change how we live or be resilient beyond what we feel ourselves capable of.

Because life changes, our brains need to change to meet it.

The physical impact of mindset on stress

We’ve all heard people talk about mindset, but for me, it was something I approached with a certain degree of scepticism and (honestly) disdain. I associated it with pseudoscience such as The Secret, corporate workplaces where the term ‘growth mindset’ is misused, and the sort of toxic positivity where someone dismisses someone else’s difficulty or suffering by telling them to “just be more positive!”. However, research into mindset is starting to shed light on the placebo effect - the effect in which a person experiences a real physical and psychological response which improves their health after taking an inactive medication - in ways that I believe are going to fundamentally change medicine in the next 25 years.

I recently recorded a podcast conversation about resilience, agency, mindset, and their role in facing cancer. One of the topics we touched on was Alia Crum's incredible mindset research at the Stanford Mind & Body Lab. Crum defines mindsets as core assumptions about a domain, such as stress, illness, or the body, that orient people to particular expectations and goals.³

A large part of her work is on stress. In a study published in 2013, she led a study with employees of a large financial firm in the United States during layoffs and restructuring in 2009.^4,5 These were working adults, well past their student years (the average age was 38). Participants who watched under ten minutes of video over a week presenting evidence that stress can enhance performance, health, and growth, shifted towards seeing stress that way, and reported fewer anxiety and depression symptoms and better work performance afterwards.⁴ In 2023 the lab published three randomised experiments testing a longer version, 'Rethink Stress' training of one to two hours, with employees at two companies (one group being the 2013 employees, randomised again) and with adults recruited online. Beliefs about stress shifted in all three, and in the two workplace experiments self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms fell at four weeks compared with a waitlist.⁵

I know what you’re thinking though - “all in their heads, where’s the evidence of any real physiological change?”. That is precisely where the value of Crum’s work lies. In another study, students were split into two groups, one shown a three-minute video presenting stress as enhancing, and the other shown a similar video presenting it as debilitating. Then the researchers created a stressful situation and measured participants’ levels of something called DHEAS, a hormone associated with resilience to stress. Those shown the “stress is enhancing” video showed a larger rise in DHEAS during a stressful mock interview.⁶ In another study, co-authored by Crum, with Navy SEAL candidates, those who saw stress as enhancing persisted longer in training and ran the obstacle course faster, though the study measured mindsets rather than changing them.⁷

The findings of studies like these suggest a three-step practice for managing stress:

• acknowledge the stress,
• welcome it as a sign that something you care about is at stake, and
• leverage the energy and focus it brings.⁵

Resilience in the face of illness and adversity

The part of Crum's work I find most relevant to adults is newer, and it concerns illness and other adversity. Zion, Crum, and colleagues followed 5,365 US adults aged 18 to 89 through the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. People who saw the pandemic as a catastrophe followed public-health guidance more closely but reported worse emotions, health, and wellbeing. Those who saw it as manageable reported better wellbeing, yet followed the guidance much less, which the authors suggest may reflect denial. The opportunity mindset came out best on both counts, with better wellbeing and no drop in compliance, though it wasn't linked to feeling less bad. In the first week, two-thirds of participants agreed that the pandemic was a catastrophe and three-quarters that it could be an opportunity, so at least four in ten must have held both views at once.⁸

It’s important to highlight that in a later trial, some participants found the idea of a catastrophe as an opportunity insensitive.⁹ I think that's worth addressing directly, and differentiating from toxic positivity. Writing about cancer, the researchers are clear that an opportunity mindset doesn't mean believing the illness is good or that fighting it is easy.¹⁰ It doesn't mean avoiding negative feelings either: it means acknowledging and embracing the fact that positive change or experiences can come from going through cancer.¹¹ A mindset isn't necessarily a factual claim about the illness, so shifting one usually doesn't require anyone to deny the facts.^11,12 What matters is that seeing an illness as something that can also bring opportunity, alongside the fear and grief, is associated with better wellbeing and coping.^8,11

For example, in a study with 361 adults diagnosed in the previous five months with a non-metastatic (stage I to III) cancer or a blood cancer, and having or about to start treatment, about two and a half hours of online films and reflection over ten weeks, supporting more helpful mindsets such as seeing cancer as manageable and as something that can also bring opportunity, improved self-reported quality of life and coping, and reduced physical symptom distress, compared with usual care.¹³ In other words, about two and a half hours of structured work on how people understood their situation made a measurable difference to how they said they were doing.

Changing your brain

It can feel very difficult to change something about ourselves, be it how we see adversity (for example anxiety and distress [catastrophe mindset] vs hope and determination [opportunity mindset]), or something much simpler like speaking a new language. We've all tried to learn at least one thing at some stage that we eventually decided we are just "not good at" despite battering away at it for what felt like ages (ask anyone who struggled with maths or a second language at school). You might be reading this right now wondering why your brain didn’t adapt to make you better at learning those things. If you’re thinking “If neuroplasticity works, why didn’t my brain adapt?”, the answer lies in two things:

1. How you go about the learning process (what you practise, how you practise, how you think about your practice, and how close to what you needed to do your practice was).
2. How much you practised (firing the cells in the neural pathways that are necessary for the thing you were trying to learn) and how long you persisted in practising.

It's possible to break these two simple ideas down into a set of principles for invoking neuroplasticity. Kleim and Jones, writing in 2008 about how to use neuroplasticity to maximise learning gains for patients who have suffered brain damage, offered a set of ten principles:¹⁴

1. Use It or Lose It
2. Use It and Improve It
3. Specificity
4. Repetition Matters
5. Intensity Matters
6. Time Matters
7. Salience Matters (relevance and importance)
8. Age Matters
9. Transference
10. Interference

Understanding these and how they apply to our brains enables us to customise how we approach learning something to maximise the extent to which we activate neuroplasticity. And that’s where Human Capacity Architecture comes in.

Human Capacity Architecture in adult life

Recapping: how you understand and frame a demanding situation affects how you respond to it,^4,13 with early evidence that this reaches the body too,^6,9 and targeted, sustained use can change the adult brain through neuroplasticity.¹ HCA draws on both of these principles. It helps you to build an accurate understanding of how your own brain and nervous system work, and then uses that understanding to empower you to run your brain deliberately, using the ten principles of neuroplasticity¹⁴ to approach learning and change in ways that work with your neurobiology.

HCA is educational and developmental. It isn’t treatment, and it doesn’t replace medical or psychological care.

To talk about whether HCA fits where you are now, book a discovery call or get in touch. For an overview of the framework, see Human Capacity Architecture™.