Today's Wisdom - Neuroplasticity, Vespasian and Dissipation

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If you spent your childhood catching Pikachu on a Game Boy in the late 1990s, your brain is physically different from someone who didn't, and scientists can prove it with an fMRI scan. A 2019 study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Stanford researchers found that adults who played Pokémon extensively as children have a dedicated region in their ventral temporal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for visual recognition, that activates specifically when they see Pokémon characters. People who never played Pokémon don't have this response. The researchers scanned two groups of adults, Pokémon players and non-players, and showed them images of Pokémon characters alongside other visual stimuli like faces, animals, and objects. The Pokémon-experienced group showed consistent, category-selective brain activity in nearly the same location across different individuals, meaning their brains had literally rewired themselves during childhood to recognize Squirtle and Charizard as efficiently as they recognize human faces. This demonstrates how profoundly early childhood experiences shape brain architecture and raises important questions about what we allow children’s developing brains to organize around today.

The mechanism behind this is known as neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to reorganize itself based on experience, which is especially powerful during childhood when neural pathways are still forming. The visual word form area, a region in the left ventral temporal cortex that recognizes written language, doesn't exist at birth. Instead it develops between ages 5-7 as children learn to read, and brain scans show it appears in roughly the same location across literate adults regardless of language. Similarly, studies of London taxi drivers by Eleanor Maguire found that their hippocampus, responsible for spatial navigation, physically enlarges after years of memorizing the city's 25,000 streets, proving that intensive experience causes measurable structural changes. The Pokémon study adds a crucial detail: the consistency across individuals suggests that shared viewing conditions matter. Pokémon players all looked at the same small Game Boy screen at similar distances during the same developmental window, creating nearly identical visual input patterns that led to nearly identical brain organization. The researchers hypothesize that because the characters were small, centered on a handheld screen, and viewed for hundreds of hours during peak brain development ages 5-11, the brain carved out dedicated neural real estate for processing them. This isn't unique to Pokémon, it would apply to anything children interact with repetitively during critical developmental periods.

The implications are staggering and largely ignored. If hundreds of hours of Pokémon exposure during childhood can shape brain organization, what might thousands of hours of social media use do to a teenager’s developing prefrontal cortex? What neural pathways are being reinforced when children spend more time swiping through TikTok than reading books, having conversations, or playing outside? The brain reallocates existing systems based on what it encounters most frequently, which means every experience children have is competing for neural territory. Reading develops the visual word form area and strengthens language processing. Learning music enhances auditory processing and fine motor control. Physical play develops spatial reasoning and risk assessment. Excessive screen time optimizes the brain for rapid context-switching, dopamine-seeking behavior, and passive consumption, which are useful skills for navigating digital platforms but terrible foundations for sustained attention, critical thinking, or delayed gratification. The Stanford researchers found that adults who played Pokémon decades ago still show the same brain responses, meaning the neural organization established at age 8 persists at age 30. Parents obsess over what foods their children eat, which schools they attend, and whether they get enough sleep, but we're barely beginning to understand that what children look at, interact with, and consume cognitively during ages 5-12 may be more important than anything else.

Amid a long line of often chaotic and aristocratic emperors, Vespasian stands out as one of the most unexpected candidates to claim the throne. Born in 9 AD in a small Sabine hill town northeast of Rome to a tax collector father, he had none of the aristocratic lineage that the Roman system demanded of its leaders. He was, by the standards of imperial Rome, a nobody. Yet he clawed his way through the military ranks over decades of unglamorous service, commanding legions in Britain during the invasion of 43 AD where he personally led assaults on over thirty hill forts, earning a reputation for relentless, grinding competence. When the Emperor Nero sent him to suppress the Jewish revolt in 66 AD, it was the kind of assignment handed to a general considered reliable enough to handle a mess but not important enough to be a political threat. It ultimately became the campaign that positioned him to become emperor.

The year 69 AD is known to historians as the Year of the Four Emperors, one of the most extraordinary twelve months in Roman history. Emperor Nero's suicide triggered a brutal civil war that cycled through Galba, Otho, and Vitellius in quick succession, each man seizing and losing power within months. Vespasian, still camped outside Jerusalem, watched this chaos from a distance and made his move. His legions declared him emperor in July 69 AD, and within months his allies had stormed Rome to kill and drag Vitellius through the streets. What followed was a decade of rule so stable and competent that it felt almost miraculous after the preceding carnage. Rome's treasury was empty, its institutions were exhausted, and its confidence in the idea of government itself had been severely shaken. Vespasian responded with the instincts of the tax collector's son he was. He raised taxes, cut wasteful expenditure, and began the most ambitious building programme Rome had seen in a generation. He commissioned the Colosseum on the site of Nero's obscenely lavish private lake, a calculated symbolic act that handed back to the Roman people the land their previous emperor had stolen for himself.

What made Vespasian genuinely remarkable, in an age that produced monsters alongside geniuses, was his refusal to take himself too seriously. He was famously coarse in his humour, openly mocked the cult of imperial dignity that had driven emperors before him to madness and tyranny, and treated the elaborate religious mythology surrounding Roman emperors with undisguised scepticism. When he lay dying in 79 AD, he allegedly turned to those gathered at his bedside and said with a grin: "Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god." It was a reference to the Roman tradition of deifying emperors after death, and it was the last joke of a man who had spent a decade rebuilding an empire while never quite believing his own mythology. His son Titus would succeed him and complete the Colosseum, opening it to the public in 80 AD with a hundred days of games. The dynasty Vespasian founded, the Flavians, lasted only until 96 AD, but the decade he spent in power gave Rome the stability it needed to survive. He remains a rare example of an emperor who inherited a crisis, stabilized the empire, and left it in a stronger position than he found it.

The consequences of large lottery wins can be more complex, and often more troubling, than people expect. Winners of nine-figure jackpots face a disproportionately higher probability of being targeted for violent crime compared to the general population, and they are statistically more likely to be victimized by a family member. They are bankrupted, kidnapped, and sued at rates far above the statistical norm with nearly one third of all multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declaring bankruptcy. Think about that for a moment, you hand someone fifty million dollars and there is a one in three chance they end up in a courtroom explaining how it has all gone. A 2001 paper by economists Guido Imbens, Bruce Sacerdote, and statistician Donald Rubin tracked lottery winners approximately ten years after their win and found they had saved just sixteen cents of every dollar won, with the rest spent, squandered, or lost.

Jack Whittaker won $315 million in 2002, the largest single jackpot in American history at the time, and he was already worth $15 million before a single number was drawn. By every measure he was the ideal candidate to handle a windfall. He took home $114 million after taxes, announced he would live as if nothing had changed, and within two years his granddaughter had been found dead wrapped in a tarp, his marriage was over, and a casino was suing him for bounced checks. Billie Bob Harrell Jr. won $31 million in Texas in 1997 and was dead by suicide two years later, his final words reportedly being that winning the lottery was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. William Post won $16.2 million in Pennsylvania and within a year his own brother had hired a contract killer to murder him, his landlady had sued him for a share of the winnings, and he had been convicted of assault for firing a gun at a debt collector. Then there is Evelyn Adams who won the New Jersey lottery not once but twice, collecting $5.4 million in consecutive years across 1985 and 1986. She was living in a trailer with almost nothing left by 2001. The pattern, across dozens of cases and decades, is always the same: a large sudden windfall does not change who you are, it amplifies it, while also simultaneously changing how every person in your life sees you.

The good news is that if your numbers do come up, or if you find yourself on the receiving end of a large inheritance, the damage is almost entirely preventable. The first and most critical step is to tell nobody. The moment a second person knows, the social pressure that ruins most winners begins its countdown. Before you sign the ticket or accept any funds, contact a lawyer who specialises specifically in lottery wins or estate law, because in many jurisdictions signing a lottery ticket immediately locks the prize to you personally, whereas an unsigned ticket can be claimed through a legal structure that shields your identity entirely. Beyond the legal structure, the near-universal financial advice for anyone receiving a large sum of money is to let it sit completely untouched in a high-interest account for a minimum of six months before making a single significant decision. Research on sudden wealth consistently shows that the choices made in the first flush of excitement are the ones people most catastrophically regret. During that period, assemble a small, vetted team consisting of an independent financial advisor who charges a flat fee rather than commission, a tax specialist, and an estate planning attorney, being careful that none of them know the full picture of what the others are advising. Diversify what you do invest across multiple asset classes and resist entirely the gravitational pull toward high-risk investments, cryptocurrency, and the various confident entrepreneurs who will materialise from your past the moment word gets out. When it comes to the lottery the winners who keep their money and their sanity tend to be the ones nobody ever hears about.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team