Neuroplasticity - How it can make humans more sustainable

Neuroplasticity or more simply put our brains ability to constantly rewire itself during our entire lifetime is a key process if we are to change our behavior to become more conscious of our impact on the natural world and evolve into a sustainable species rather than a destructive one.

We have basically trained ourselves to be irresponsible, to just throw things away when we are done with it with no thought of the consequences. It is a learned behavior, it can and must be unlearned, essentially rewiring our brain to use natural resources wisely and responsibly.

We can use bio-mimicry as the gold standard as there is no trash in the natural world, likewise we should produce no trash. All of our waste is reusable and or re-processable. Even plastics which I fundementally don't like since long-chain polymers don't occur in the natural world are tolerable in this scenario, plastics are incredibly useful, the good news about plastic is that the molecules are endlessly re-processable, if we recycled every bit of it the LCA is actually pretty good. In our irresponsible dump it in the ocean world plastic is deadly.

It all comes down to trained behavior, neuroplasticity as a concept can help us to turn this scenario around!

Neuroplasticity (also known as cortical re-mapping) refers to the ability of the human brain to change as a result of one's experience, that the brain is 'plastic' and 'malleable'. The discovery of this feature of the brain is rather modern; the previous belief amongst scientists was that the brain does not change after the critical period of infancy.^{[1] Excerpt form Wikipedia}