The brain is a result of how you "exercise" it, or not. It's the result of what you feed it, or not. It's not static.
Neuro-plasticity enables stroke victims to recover. And the depth and breadth of that recovery is a function of how much or not the brain is forced to rewire.
Exercising your brain causes structural changes, whereby neuronal circuity is "rewired" to create more optimal paths. Stroke victim recovery is functional, in which parts of the brain take over responsibilities for what was damaged (but it's not "transferred", you still need to learn it all over again).
Neither, however, somehow magically define you as a person just because your brain decided some optimizations would help with repetitive tasks or worst-case decided cortical remapping was necessary to recover from injury.
That is, what you "feed" your brain will manifest itself physically as paths in the brain. Full stop.
When you develop a habit of consuming violece - and enjoying it - those paths are real. Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them magically disappear. Confirmation bias works that way, the science does not.
Furthermore, human behavior is often learned for the collective. That is, for example, given a group of cigarette smokers, the more who quit smoking, the more likely others in the group are likely to quit.
Put another way, going in the other direction, humans naturally gravitate to broader norms. That is, the more I see others with excessive weight, the more likely others will join that club. So yes actually, you are what you eat. Literally.
Now please explain - not being snatky - how that's nonsensical.
Except that's exactly what is up for discussion, and so far there is no evidence that this is the case. There's a big difference between muscle memory, neuroplasticity, and playing the piano than their is for sitting on the couch and consuming violent media.
> Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them magically disappear.
Saying they exist doesn't make them magically appear.
> Furthermore, human behavior is often learned for the collective
Yes, that's also how morals work. The more people are exposed to something, the more morally acceptable it becomes.
> Now please explain - not being snatky - how that's nonsensical.
Short witticisms like "you are what you eat" or "you are what you learn" are shallow and vastly underestimate the subjects at hand in exchange for a quick nod. Such as "we are greater than the sum of our parts".
So the brain and mind work a certain way...except for video games and violent?
Did you read the Abstract on this "study"? FSS you can drive the planet Jupiter through the holes.
If we're going to discuss evidence, there's no evidence anyone reasonable would read that abstract and put their credibility behind it. HN is such a funny place sometimes. But I trust you can read the article or abstract and see the question marks. But if not, LMK and I'll break it down.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049
"Therefore, it is determined that adolescents who played a high-level of violent video games at an early age did not show more aggressive behavior later in life than those who played fewer to no hours of violent video games at an early age."
The idea that consumption of violent media changes pathways in such a way that the expression of violent behavior is more common, is null and void. There's zilch, nada, zero evidence to support this including decades of prior research on film and television influence.
Maybe the pathways being trained have less to do with aggression and violence, and more to do with hand-eye coordination and other motor reflexes involved in the process.
Eat crap. Become crap. Brain may still work ...but on a deformed body
No, which is the entire premise of the linked article we're discussing.
> And what about 10 or 20 years from now, will your non-desire to shoot people still not exist?
Perhaps, but it will have considerably less to do with video games than other life factors.
> Neuro-plasticity effectively dictatess we are what we consume, we are what we do
This isn't what neuro-plasticity means. It means your brain can perform a task with less work, not that you "become" something because the pathways are optimized for a task.