0°C | Saturday October 11, 2025 
By Living To Thrive’s Chuck Anderson
I spoke with psychologist Dr Rick Hanson, a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author of several books selling over a million copies in English alone. He’s lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centres worldwide and much more.
Sun: What is neuropsychology exactly?
Hanson: In general terms, neuropsychology is the science and practice of integrating mental activity and underlying neural activity. A narrower meaning of neuropsychology is a branch of clinical psychology that focuses on damage to the brain such as injuries to the brain and rehabilitation of things like concussions or strokes.
Sun: What is neuroplasticity and why is it so significant?
Hanson: Neuroplasticity is how the nervous system whose headquarters is the brain can be changed by the information flowing through it. The function of the nervous system is to process information by representing it, storing it, and communicating and acting upon it. That’s why we have a nervous system. Our ancient multicellular ancestors, arising roughly 650 million years ago in the primordial seas, did not have a nervous system, but as they grew increasingly complex their sensory systems and motor systems needed to communicate with each other which is where the nervous system comes in.
So, in simpler terms, neuroplasticity means that any animal with a nervous system ranging from a tiny 1-millimetre-long worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, or C. elegans, with 302 neurons with the smallest nervous system all the way up through frogs, lizards, fish, rats, squirrels, the monkeys, the early hominids and us. Neuroplasticity enables us to learn so we do not just drum on autopilot moving through life. Going as far back as Aristotle, it has been understood that the brain somehow was involved in learning neuroplasticity, so it is not a recent invention.
Conversely, over the last 20-30 years, a tremendous explosion of scientific understanding of neuroplasticity has had many practical implications.
That new understanding shows how we can use this fundamental property of the brain for the better and what we can do to help the brain heal from trauma, or simply the day-to-day stresses that we all face at times.
Sun: In relation to neuroplasticity, can you talk us through your “Taking in the Good” practice?
Hanson: To deal with life, we need various capabilities and qualities, traits of various kinds such as emotional intelligence, confidence, grit, gratitude, compassion and self-worth. How do we get them? We get them by learning them.
However, we have a brain that’s very good at learning from bad experiences, but relatively poor at learning from good experiences. That’s what we call a negativity bias, which kept our ancestors alive under harsh conditions by tracking threats and avoiding them.
It’s important to claim the power to help ourselves. Grow and heal and learn from the experiences we’re handling of whatever we want to develop inside ourselves. It’s a way of looking at things that are essentially a growth 2.0 model. Most forms of psychotherapy, mindfulness training, coaching, human resources development, character education, etc. are in a growth 1.0 model in which the person is treated like an empty vessel where information and experiences are recorded with the hopes that some will stick. Sometimes something does stick and there’s a lasting improvement in mood and release of anxiety and/or depression.
However, and I have experienced this myself, many of the experiences of the growth 1.0 model fail to stick long-term leaving no beneficial trace behind in the nervous system which is why I’ve become interested in the growth 2.0 model.
In the growth 2.0 model, we treat people as active agents of their gradual healing in such a way that we teach people how to turn the experiences they’re having into lasting, beneficial changes in the neural structure or function of their nervous system.
What I’ve developed is a framework that pulls together various evidence-based methods. There’s already evidence for these methods scattered throughout the territory of research on the brain. Methods that people can engage in to create long-term change in their nervous system through what they’re experiencing.
There is a famous saying, “neurons that fire together wire together”. The longer neurons fire together, the more likely they are to wire together creating lasting change in your nervous system.
Positive experiences in everyday life, not the $1,000,000 moments that are highly limited, are key. For example, when your partner gives you a compliment, your kid says “I love you” or your pup crawls onto your lap for a snuggle. Stay with those experiences for 5-10 seconds. The longer you sustain that experience, the more you’re going to change your brain from those neurons firing and wiring.
When you do this, you are now using an evidence-based method that has to do with extending the duration of your experiences or feeling it in your body. The more that an experience moves your body out of thinking and more into sensing and feeling the more of the neural trace is likely to be present.
Sun: Where can someone find out more about the insights you’ve provided?
Hanson: They can go to my website www.RickHanson.net. They will find free resources on the content we covered today, well-structured online courses and I have a newsletter with 240,000 subscribers. The newsletter is called “Just One Thing”. It goes out each week to help people focus on one simple thing they can do to enhance their well-being. There is also the podcast I co-host with my son Forest called “Being Well” along with a slew of other resources on my website.
Dr Hanson explains, neuroplasticity allows us to create lasting and invaluable change. I encourage all of us to take advantage of these simple methods of working towards becoming a better version of ourselves. Check out his website to find out more.