What Is Myelination? How Practice Shapes Your Brain | Naeem Mahmood

What Is Myelination? How Practice Shapes the Brain You Change With

October 19, 2026

Most of us have had the experience of trying to change something (a habit, a way of speaking up in meetings, a belief about what we’re capable of) and finding that knowing what to do isn’t the same as being able to do it. Insight is fast. Change is slower.

One reason for that gap may live in your biology. Your brain is constantly adapting to what you repeatedly do, and one of the quieter processes involved is called myelination. Understanding it, even in simplified form, can change how you think about practice, patience and personal change.

What Is Myelin? The Brain’s Insulation

Your brain and nervous system communicate through neurons: cells that send electrical signals along long, thin extensions called axons. Many of those axons are wrapped in a fatty, layered coating called myelin. That coating is often described as the myelin sheath.

The easiest way to picture it is insulation on an electrical wire. A wire without insulation still carries current, but less efficiently. Myelin helps nerve signals travel faster and with more precise timing. Rather than crawling continuously along the axon, the signal can effectively “jump” between small gaps in the sheath, which speeds things up considerably.

Timing matters too. Many skills (from a tennis serve to finding the right words under pressure) depend on brain regions firing in a well-coordinated sequence, and better-insulated pathways may help signals arrive in sync.

What Is Myelination?

Myelination is the process of forming and adding myelin around axons. A huge amount of it happens in childhood and adolescence, and it continues well into early adulthood. Areas involved in planning and self-control are among the later regions to finish maturing.

Here’s the part that’s interesting for anyone trying to grow: researchers have found evidence that myelination isn’t only a fixed developmental timetable. In both animal studies and human brain-imaging research, myelin appears to respond, at least in part, to activity, in other words, to how pathways are used (see this review of activity-dependent myelination in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and a brain-imaging study of adults learning to juggle in Nature Neuroscience). Scientists are still working out how big this effect is in adults, how quickly it happens, and exactly how it relates to performance. But the emerging picture is that the brain may invest more insulation in the circuits you use often.

That’s a hopeful idea, with an important caveat: myelin is one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Learning also involves changes in the strength of connections between neurons (synapses), the growth of new connections, and many other processes. Myelin isn’t “skill” itself. It’s better understood as one of the ways the brain may make well-used pathways more efficient.

The Talent Code and the Myelin Story

If you’ve heard myelin discussed outside a neuroscience classroom, there’s a good chance it traces back to Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code. Coyle visited places that seemed to produce unusual numbers of high performers (music schools, sports academies and more) and looked for common threads.

His popular framing, in short: the way these people practiced looked different. They worked in focused bursts, deliberately struggled at the edge of what they could do, made mistakes, corrected them and repeated. Coyle connected that style of practice to myelin, suggesting that this kind of effortful repetition is what the brain responds to by strengthening the relevant circuits.

It’s a compelling story that brought myelination to a wide audience. It’s also worth holding with nuance: the science of myelin and skill is still developing, and talent and performance are shaped by many factors, including genetics, environment, coaching, opportunity, rest and more. The takeaway isn’t “myelin explains everything.” It’s that how you practice may matter as much as how much.

Synaptic Pruning: The Brain Trims What It Doesn’t Use

If myelination is the brain reinforcing what you use, synaptic pruning is something like the opposite side of the same coin.

During development, the brain produces more connections between neurons than it ends up keeping (a classic study of the human cerebral cortex traced this rise and decline region by region). Over time, it trims connections that aren’t being used much, while the more active ones tend to be preserved. This is often called neural pruning, and it’s a normal, healthy part of how brains become more efficient. Most pruning happens during childhood and adolescence, though connections in the adult brain continue to be formed, strengthened and weakened throughout life.

Why does this matter for change? Because it reinforces a simple, slightly uncomfortable truth: the brain tends to organize itself around what you actually do, not what you intend to do. The patterns you rehearse (in behavior, in attention, even arguably in the stories you tell yourself) are the ones that get practiced. The patterns you stop rehearsing may become less automatic over time.

Why Deliberate Practice Matters

So if repetition shapes the brain, is all repetition equal? Probably not.

The term deliberate practice comes from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s research on expert performance. It describes a specific kind of practice:

  • Focused: full attention, not autopilot.
  • At the edge of your ability: hard enough that you make mistakes.
  • With clear goals: working on a specific element, not “getting better” in general.
  • With feedback and correction: noticing errors and adjusting quickly.
  • Repeated: cycling through attempt, error, correction, attempt.

Compare that with doing the same thing the same way, comfortably, for years. Plenty of people drive for decades without getting much better at driving. Experience alone isn’t improvement.

Researchers continue to debate how much of the difference between performers deliberate practice explains. It’s clearly not the only factor. But as a way of structuring effort, it gives you a practical model: the struggle you feel at the edge of your ability isn’t a sign that you’re failing. It’s often a sign you’re practicing in a way that’s more likely to lead to learning.

How to Build New Neural Pathways: Practical Takeaways

You don’t need a lab to use these ideas. Whether you’re a founder learning to delegate, a leader working on how you communicate, or someone trying to replace an old habit or belief, here are some grounded ways to apply them:

  1. Shrink the skill. Break what you want to change into small, specific pieces. “Be a better communicator” is vague; “pause and ask one clarifying question before responding” is practicable.
  2. Practice at the edge, not in the comfort zone. Pick reps that feel slightly hard. If it feels effortless, you’re likely rehearsing, not stretching.
  3. Welcome mistakes as information. Errors followed by correction are a core part of deliberate practice. Notice, adjust, go again.
  4. Repeat more often, in shorter sessions. Frequent, focused repetition generally beats occasional marathon sessions, and it gives the brain time between sessions to consolidate.
  5. Get feedback. A coach, a peer, a recording of yourself, or a simple checklist can show you what you can’t see from the inside.
  6. Stop rehearsing the old pattern where you can. If the brain organizes around what you repeat, every time you choose the new response, you’re giving it a reason to prioritize that path.
  7. Practice inner skills, too. The same principles plausibly apply to the questions you habitually ask yourself, the way you frame problems, and how you manage your state. Asking “What do I want here?” instead of “What’s wrong?” is a small rep, and reps add up.
  8. Be patient with the timeline. Brain changes from practice are generally gradual. Be skeptical of anything promising to “rewire your brain” in days. Consistency over weeks and months is a more realistic frame.

A note on “brain plasticity exercises”: you’ll find many apps and games marketed this way. The evidence suggests people mostly get better at what they specifically practice, and gains don’t always transfer to unrelated skills. The most useful “brain plasticity exercise” is usually deliberate practice of the actual skill you want.

The Bigger Picture: Change Is a Skill You Can Learn

What strikes me most about myelination isn’t the biology on its own. It’s the reframe: change isn’t just a matter of willpower or one big breakthrough moment. It looks a lot more like learning a skill, and skills can be broken down, practiced and improved.

That’s the idea behind Peak Humans. Peak Humans is a growing hub of tools, frameworks and modalities for change and learning: the core skills I believe everyone should have access to, the way we all learned the ABCs or basic math. Things like asking better questions, shifting from a problem frame to an outcome frame, managing state and emotion, using language with intention, and understanding how you and others learn and communicate, all grounded in what we understand about how the brain learns.

This post is one of the first pieces. More tools, guides and resources are on the way on the blog and the Peak Humans podcast, and if you want these ideas brought to your team, see keynote speaking.

Sources and further reading

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