Kavita Jadhav
Not every bias lives only in thought. Some are trained into the body-brain system through repetition.
Modern neuroscience describes neuroplasticity as the brain’s lifelong capacity to reorganize itself in response to experience, learning, environment, and repeated activity. Repeated patterns can alter synaptic strength, network function, and even structural features tied to learning and memory. Reviews of recent evidence describe plasticity as involving changes from gene expression and neurotransmission to cellular reorganization and functional connectivity, while classic work on learning shows that repeated training can produce long-lasting retention of some newly formed synaptic changes.
In parallel, the Vedantic idea of saṁskāras points to accumulated impressions that shape perception, desire, reaction, and habit. The concepts are not identical, and saṁskāras should not be reduced to neurons alone. But there is a profound bridge here: what is repeated leaves a trace. What is emotionally reinforced becomes easier to repeat. What is practiced with attachment becomes nature-like. The Gita itself acknowledges the force of conditioning, saying that even the wise act according to their nature, while also teaching that the restless mind can still be brought under control through practice and detachment.
This chapter argues that habitual biases become powerful not only because they are believed, but because they are rehearsed.
Suspicion practiced daily becomes easier to think. Anger repeatedly indulged becomes easier to activate. Fear constantly fed becomes easier to interpret as truth. Devotion steadily practiced becomes easier to inhabit.
In this sense, both illusion and liberation are trained. Neuroscience shows that repetition changes the system. The Gita shows that disciplined repetition can purify it.
The chapter also shows how, through neuroplasticity, a person can move from being a victim of an abuser’s bias to becoming a clearer channel of awareness.
The devotional path and scientific self-awareness are traditional means of expanding human capability by retraining the mind, weakening illusion, and reshaping conditioned responses.
In this vision, even ordinary human beings — regardless of status — can gradually rise toward higher consciousness, reduce suffering in this life and future births, and help move collective consciousness toward Ram Rajya.
For a complete seven-stage journey from inner conflict to final liberation, follow journeytokrishna.com.
The chapter examines how repeated thought, emotion, and action shape both neural pathways and saṁskāras in real life, making distortion more automatic — but also making liberation more trainable.
Repeated anger becomes easier to trigger
A person who repeatedly indulges harsh speech, resentment, and blame may strengthen reactive pathways until anger feels natural rather than conditioned.
Fear rehearsed daily becomes “common sense”
A family or individual constantly repeating narratives of danger, betrayal, and suspicion may train the mind to interpret ordinary life through fear.
Sensual indulgence deepens craving pathways
Repeated pleasure-seeking, overstimulation, and fantasy may strengthen desire until restraint feels weak and indulgence feels automatic.
Humiliation becomes internalized self-doubt
A person repeatedly exposed to blame, mockery, or emotional abuse may begin to think through the abuser’s narrative and lose trust in their own worth.
Patriarchal bias becomes embodied as instinct
When domination, female silencing, and male entitlement are repeated across generations, they may begin to feel like nature rather than distortion.
Suspicion toward women becomes automatic
A household that constantly interprets women’s freedom, self-contentment, or intelligence as danger may train men and women alike into distorted vigilance.
Addiction to outrage narrows perception
Repeated exposure to disturbing news, mockery, tribal media, or hostile commentary may train the brain toward agitation and moral overreaction.
Comparison becomes a default mode of mind
A person who constantly measures themselves against others may strengthen insecurity, envy, and dissatisfaction until comparison feels unavoidable.
Abusive narratives become self-identity
A victim repeatedly told they are the cause of family decline may gradually embody that falsehood and live under imposed shame.
Greed strengthens restless cognition
Repeated financial obsession, risky trading, and reward-chasing may train the mind into impulsive loops where caution feels like obstruction.
Collective distortion becomes embodied culture
When prejudice, scapegoating, and emotional harshness are repeated daily in a family or community, neuroplasticity helps make that distortion feel normal, moral, and inevitable.
Daily devotion builds steadiness
Chanting, prayer, remembrance of God, and regular spiritual discipline may gradually train the mind toward calmness, focus, and inner stability.
Self-observation weakens reactive loops
A seeker who repeatedly notices triggers, body-states, and thought patterns may begin interrupting old conditioning instead of automatically obeying it.
Kind speech retrains emotional response
When a person consistently practices restraint, gentleness, and truthful speech, the mind becomes less inclined toward verbal aggression.
Compassion becomes more natural through repetition
Acts of kindness, service, and empathy may slowly rewire the heart so that care becomes easier and cruelty less attractive.
Bhakti strengthens higher emotional pathways
Devotion to Krishna, sacred music, prayer, and loving remembrance may retrain emotional life away from craving and toward sacred absorption.
Boundaries restore inner clarity
A person who repeatedly protects their time, mind, and energy from manipulation may gradually rewire away from fear-based compliance.
Truthful reflection reduces imposed shame
Someone recovering from abuse may slowly retrain the mind by replacing false narratives with truthful self-understanding.
Discipline weakens sensory compulsion
Repeated restraint in food, media, speech, and pleasure-seeking may strengthen self-regulation and make indulgence less automatic.
Higher knowledge reshapes interpretation
Studying the Gita, Vedantic psychology, and truthful teachings may gradually retrain the mind to interpret life through dharma rather than fear or ego.
Safe relationships rewire trust
When a wounded person repeatedly experiences fairness, dignity, and respect, the nervous system may slowly relearn safety and reduce defensive conditioning.
Awareness becomes the new default
Through steady practice, devotion, and scientific self-awareness, a person may move from conditioned reactivity to becoming a clearer channel of awareness, where truth becomes easier to perceive and live.
In all such cases, neuroplasticity shows that repeated patterns do not remain neutral: they either deepen bondage or strengthen liberation, depending on what the mind rehearses each day.
The mind does not become what it occasionally touches. It becomes what it repeatedly rehearses.
A person may think they are merely “having” the same thoughts again and again, but repeated thoughts are not passive events. They are training events. The same fear, the same judgment, the same resentment, the same craving, the same narrative, the same devotion, the same prayer, the same type of media exposure, the same reaction to the same people — these do not simply pass through consciousness. They leave traces.
Neuroscience provides one language for understanding this. Repeated activation alters networks. Learning involves plastic change. Habit formation recruits brain systems that increasingly support automatic, less flexible responding, especially through cortico-basal ganglia circuitry. Reviews on habits emphasize that with repetition, behavior can shift from more prospective, goal-directed control toward more fixed stimulus-response patterns.
Vedanta provides another language. Saṁskāras are impressions left by repeated thought, emotion, action, and attachment. They shape what feels natural, what draws the mind, what repels it, and what becomes difficult to interrupt. If neuroscience explains the physical side of repetition, Vedanta explains its existential and moral momentum. Together they help us see why some distortions feel stronger than choice and why liberation requires more than one good insight. It requires retraining.
This chapter therefore asks: how do repeated biases become embodied? How do habits of fear, craving, prejudice, and ego become easier to repeat over time? What is the relationship between neuroplasticity and saṁskāra? And if the system has been trained into distortion, how can it be trained toward clarity, devotion, and freedom?
This chapter bridges the ancient psychological insights of the Bhagavad Gita with the modern biological reality of neuroplasticity. It explores the profound idea that our character is not a static “soul” but a dynamic biological architecture built through repetition.
In modern neuroscience, the mantra is: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Every thought, emotion, and reaction triggers a specific electrochemical signal across a synapse. When these signals are repeated, the brain physically adapts:
Myelination: The “insulation” around neural pathways thickens, making the signal travel faster and more efficiently.
Synaptic Pruning: Pathways we don’t use are “pruned” away, while those we repeat become “superhighways.”
This is why a habitual bias feels like a “gut instinct.” It isn’t necessarily truth; it is simply a high-speed neural path that has been reinforced until it requires almost zero energy to travel.
The Gita describes this phenomenon through the concept of Saṁskāras (subconscious impressions).
The Analogy of the Riverbed: Every action is like a drop of water. One drop does nothing, but a steady stream eventually carves a deep canyon into the rock. Once that canyon (Saṁskāra) exists, all future water (thought) naturally flows into it.
Vāsanās: These are the “latent tendencies” or the “smell” left behind by our habits. Even when we aren’t actively being angry or fearful, the “scent” of that habit lingers in our neural circuitry, ready to be triggered.
The chapter argues that illusion is a trained state. When we feed fear, we aren’t just feeling an emotion; we are practicing a skill.
The Bias Loop: If you daily practice “suspicion,” your brain becomes hyper-efficient at spotting threats — even where none exist.
Physical Realignment: Your amygdala (the brain’s alarm system) becomes enlarged and hypersensitive, while your prefrontal cortex (the seat of logic) may actually weaken.
“We do not see things as they are; we see them as we have trained our brains to interpret them.”
The Gita acknowledges a fundamental biological truth: we cannot simply “will” ourselves into a state of enlightenment through a single moment of clarity. Instead, it advocates for Abhyāsa, or disciplined practice, as the primary mechanism for transformation. This transition represents a shift from the Habitual Cycle of Avidya (ignorance) to the Disciplined Cycle of Yoga.
In the Habitual Cycle, the mind is primarily reactive, driven by external triggers and environmental stressors that activate pre-existing neural shortcuts. This process is largely random, as we unconsciously rehearse whatever emotions — anger, anxiety, or greed — happen to arise in the moment. Over time, this cycle becomes entropic, meaning it deepens existing biases and strengthens the physical “grooves” of the old self, making it harder to escape the gravity of past behavior.
Conversely, the Disciplined Cycle of Yoga is intentional, guided by internal values and the higher intellect rather than external stimuli. It replaces random emotional rehearsal with ritualized actions, such as the rhythmic repetition of a mantra, conscious breathwork, or selfless service. This repetition serves a purifying function; in neurological terms, it initiates the “thinning” of old neural pathways through disuse while simultaneously forging new, healthier circuits. By consistently choosing the path of Yoga, the practitioner effectively “reprograms” the system, transforming liberation from a philosophical concept into a physical, lived reality.
The physical brain is a record of the past, but neuroplasticity is the promise of the future. By understanding that our biases are physically “wired,” we can stop viewing them as moral failings and start viewing them as biological momentum.
Liberation, then, is the act of consciously choosing which “canyons” we want to carve. Through the “disciplined repetition” of the Gita — meditation, selfless action, and constant awareness — we can literally physically dissolve the neural pathways of illusion and wire the brain for peace.
If you were to pick one “neural superhighway” in your own life that you’d like to begin rerouting, which habit or bias comes to mind first?
Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s capacity to change through experience. Contemporary reviews describe it as lifelong reorganization involving changes from synapses and neurotransmitters to larger functional connectivity patterns. Learning is not only “stored” abstractly; it is accompanied by measurable biological change. Work on structural plasticity further shows that learning can involve synapse turnover and selective long-term retention of some new synaptic changes after repeated training.
Saṁskāras, in the Vedantic sense, are accumulated impressions left by past thought, feeling, action, and desire. They influence what the mind tends to seek, fear, remember, interpret, and repeat. This is not a neuroscience term, and it should not be flattened into a one-to-one brain equation. But as an interpretive bridge, it is powerful: neuroplasticity helps explain how repetition shapes the nervous system, while saṁskāra helps explain how repetition shapes character, bondage, and spiritual tendency. The bridge is not identity but correspondence.
28.1 What Neuroplasticity Is
28.2 What Saṁskāras Are
28.3 Repetition as the Bridge Between Bias and Brain Change
28.4 How Habitual Thought Becomes Easier to Repeat
28.5 Fear, Anger, Desire, and the Deepening of Neural Grooves
28.6 The Brain Basis of Habit and Automaticity
28.7 Why Conditioned Bias Feels Like Nature
28.8 A Gita-Based Understanding of Practice, Detachment, and Mental Retraining
28.9 Can Distorted Saṁskāras Be Rewired?
28.10 Devotion, Attention, and the Training of Higher Pathways
28.11 Scientific Self-Awareness as a Method of Interrupting Conditioned Loops
28.12 Practices for Rewiring Bias Toward Clarity
28.13 From Neural Habit to Spiritual Freedom
28.14 From the Victim of Abusive Bias to a Channel of Awareness Through Neuroplasticity
28.15 The Devotional Path and Scientific Self-Awareness as Traditional Means of Expanding Human Capability Through Neuroplasticity
28.16 The Vision of Realized Souls: Elevating Ordinary Human Life Through Neuroplasticity and the Breaking of Illusion
At the scientific level, neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize in response to activity, learning, environmental input, and deprivation. Reviews describe changes occurring across multiple levels, including synaptic efficacy, structural remodeling, and network-level adaptation. This is why repeated training matters so much: the system does not stay neutral while being used in the same way. It becomes altered by that use.
This has enormous implications for spiritual life. A mind repeatedly trained in resentment is not the same as a mind repeatedly trained in prayer. A brain repeatedly exposed to threat, outrage, tribal media, compulsive novelty, and reward-seeking is not in the same state as one repeatedly stabilized through disciplined attention, reflection, chanting, and restraint.
The fact that both biology and behavior adapt means that spiritual discipline is not merely symbolic. It is training. That is an inference from the neuroscience, but it is a reasonable one.
Saṁskāras are the grooves left by repetition. They are not just memories. They are tendencies. A person may not consciously choose a certain reaction each time; rather, the reaction now arises with less friction because it has been reinforced so often. This is why one person returns quickly to anger, another to fear, another to sensual fantasy, another to prayer, and another to surrender. The path already walked becomes the path most easily walked again. This is strongly echoed in the Gita’s recognition that beings act according to their nature and that the mind, though difficult to restrain, must be retrained through repeated practice and detachment.
In this sense, saṁskāra is the spiritual-psychological language for patterned becoming. It explains why insight alone is often not enough.
A seeker may understand truth for a moment and still return to old grooves because the deeper impressions are not yet purified. What is mentally believed and what is conditionally embodied are not always the same.
Repetition is where the scientific and Vedantic models meet most clearly. Habit research shows that repeated behavior can become more automatic and less sensitive to outcome value, with important involvement of basal ganglia-centered networks and multiple interacting brain regions. Reviews emphasize that habits are not simple single events but progressive changes across networks that support increasingly fixed responding.
Bias works the same way. A suspicion repeated daily becomes easier to trigger. A prejudice emotionally reinforced in family life becomes easier to feel as “obvious.” A devotion practiced steadily becomes easier to enter. A comparison habit becomes faster than inquiry.
The more a pattern is rehearsed, the less it feels like a choice and the more it feels like reality. That is exactly why distorted saṁskāras can feel like “nature” even when they were trained.
A thought repeated once may be weak. Repeated a thousand times, especially with emotion, reward, and reinforcement, it becomes easier to evoke. Neuroscience does not justify the cliché version of “every thought builds a pathway” in a simplistic way, but the broader principle is well supported: repeated learning and behavior are associated with plastic changes that make certain modes of response more available. Learning alters synaptic and network function, and repeated training can stabilize some of those changes.
This helps explain why deeply rehearsed bias resists correction.
The person is not only defending an idea. They are operating from a trained pattern. That pattern may include emotional expectations, bodily readiness, interpretive shortcuts, and automatic judgments. Spiritual work must therefore go beyond argument. It must enter practice.
Fear, anger, and desire are especially potent because emotion reinforces repetition. A mind repeatedly fed by outrage news, humiliation memories, sexual stimulation, rivalry, tribal identity, or revenge fantasies does not simply “feel a lot.” It trains itself toward certain loops. Habit research and plasticity research together suggest that repeated emotional-behavioral routines can become increasingly automatic and difficult to interrupt.
This is where the Gita becomes strikingly contemporary. It warns against the power of craving and aversion, and insists that the mind be mastered through practice.
The scientific vocabulary is different, but the practical warning is similar: what you rehearse will shape you.
The modern literature on habit formation repeatedly highlights the importance of basal ganglia and corticostriatal circuits in the transition from more deliberate action toward more automatic, stimulus-driven behavior. Reviews describe habit not as a single switch but as a set of changes distributed across brain regions, with automaticity and reduced flexibility becoming more likely under repeated reinforcement and practice.
Spiritually, this means that repeated vice and repeated virtue both become embodied. One cannot indulge a pattern for years and expect the system to remain fresh and free. Nor should one underestimate the power of small, repeated good action.
If repetition helped build bondage, repetition can also help build liberation.
One reason biases are hard to uproot is that after enough repetition they no longer feel like acquired habits. They feel like “who I am,” “how the world is,” or “what anyone sensible would see.” The Gita’s statement that even the wise act according to their nature is deeply relevant here. Conditioning becomes subjectively natural. The task is not merely suppression, because repression alone does not dissolve conditioning. The Gita instead pairs realism about the mind’s restlessness with a method: abhyāsa and vairāgya, practice and detachment.
This is the corrective to fatalism.
Conditioned nature is powerful, but not ultimate.
Bhagavad Gītā 6.35 states that the restless mind can be brought under control through practice and detachment. That is almost a training model: repetition in the right direction, combined with loosening attachment to the old loops.
Bhagavad Gītā 8.6 adds that what the mind is habitually absorbed in shapes where it goes, suggesting that repetition at the level of remembrance and absorption has existential consequence.
Bhagavad Gītā 18.30 grounds the whole process in sāttvik discernment — knowing what binds and what liberates.
Taken together, the Gita’s correction is not passive. It is a disciplined redirection of consciousness.
One must not only understand a harmful pattern; one must repeatedly stop feeding it and repeatedly nourish a liberating one.
Scientifically, the answer to whether habits and conditioned responses can change is yes, though not instantly and not always easily. Neuroplasticity is lifelong, and learning can reshape circuits across the lifespan, even if some forms of change are harder than others. Reviews of recent research emphasize that the brain remains dynamic in response to training, enrichment, deprivation, and practice.
Vedantically, distorted saṁskāras can be weakened through purification, replacement, non-feeding, devotion, and higher knowledge. The bridge between the two is disciplined repetition.
Old grooves are not erased by one insight alone; they are out-trained by sustained reorientation.
If fear and craving can be trained, so can devotion. Repeated remembrance of God, chanting, ethical restraint, truthful self-observation, and compassionate action are not only moral ideals. They are repeated acts of training. Over time, they can alter what feels natural, what the mind returns to, and what consciousness most easily inhabits. This is a philosophical and spiritual inference, but it fits what neuroscience says about repeated practice changing systems and what the
Gita says about steady remembrance and disciplined control of the mind.
This is why bhakti is not mere emotion. It is neurobehavioral and spiritual retraining.
Scientific self-awareness helps the seeker see the loop before being carried by it. What triggered me? What story became automatic? What body-state arrived first? What desire or fear got reinforced? Which pattern am I rehearsing again? This kind of observation does not itself complete liberation, but it interrupts unconscious repetition. The moment a loop is seen clearly, it is no longer identical with the self.
That is a crucial threshold.
The habit may still fire, but now it can be worked with rather than blindly obeyed.
The practical bridge between neuroplasticity and saṁskāra is disciplined repetition in a new direction. Repeated prayer. Repeated truthful speech. Repeated refusal to indulge prejudice. Repeated pausing before anger. Repeated chanting. Repeated movement of attention toward God rather than obsession. Repeated exposure to wiser environments. Repeated examination of the same distortion until it weakens.
The science supports the power of repetition in shaping learning systems, and the Gita supports the necessity of repeated practice and detachment in mastering the mind.
Freedom does not begin only when all conditioning disappears. It begins when conditioning is no longer blindly obeyed. The seeker sees the groove, stops worshipping it as identity, and trains another way. Neuroscience gives hope because plasticity remains possible. Vedanta gives hope because saṁskāras are not the deepest Self. They are impressions, not essence.
That distinction is decisive.
What has been trained can be retrained. What has been impressed can be purified.
What has become automatic can, through grace and practice, become less commanding.
A person repeatedly exposed to an abuser’s bias may begin living inside distorted narratives about their worth, safety, and identity. Through neuroplasticity, these repeated wounds can become conditioned pathways of fear, self-doubt, and emotional reactivity. Yet the same principle also gives hope: what has been trained through harm can be gradually retrained through awareness, devotion, truthful self-observation, and disciplined healing. In this way, the victim need not remain only a carrier of the abuser’s distortion.
Through conscious rewiring of thought, emotion, and attention, the wounded mind can slowly become a clearer channel of awareness, less ruled by imposed bias and more aligned with truth.
The devotional path and scientific self-awareness may be understood as traditional means of expanding human capability through neuroplasticity. Repeated devotion, chanting, disciplined attention, ethical action, and self-observation do not merely shape belief; they gradually reshape the patterns through which the mind, brain, and nervous system respond to life.
In this way, ancient spiritual disciplines can be seen not only as religious practices, but as sustained methods of retraining consciousness. Through repetition, humility, and right orientation, the seeker develops greater steadiness, discernment, emotional regulation, compassion, and inner strength.
What neuroscience calls neuroplasticity, the spiritual tradition approaches through practice, saṁskāra, purification, and devotion.
The vision of realized souls is not that only a rare few can awaken, but that ordinary human beings can gradually be elevated to higher consciousness and reduced suffering through disciplined transformation of the mind.
By breaking illusion, retraining perception, and purifying repeated patterns through devotion and scientific self-awareness, the human instrument can be reshaped.
In this way, neuroplasticity becomes one bridge through which spiritual practice can reduce suffering not only in the present life, but also in future births by weakening the impressions that keep consciousness bound.
Neuroplasticity and saṁskāra illuminate the same practical truth from different directions: repetition matters. Modern neuroscience shows that experience, learning, and repeated activity change the brain across synaptic, structural, and network levels. Vedanta shows that repeated thought, emotion, and action leave impressions that shape nature, tendency, and bondage. The concepts are not identical, but together they form a powerful map of conditioning.
This means habitual bias is not merely a moral problem. It is a trained problem. And liberation is not merely a belief shift. It is a retraining of consciousness through discernment, practice, detachment, and devotion.
The more clearly this is understood, the less the seeker romanticizes “just being this way,” and the more seriously they take the daily shaping of their own mind.
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Ardestani et al. (2023/2024 PMC record). Exploring the Role of Neuroplasticity in Development, Aging, and Neurodegeneration.
Smith, K. S., & Graybiel, A. M. (2011). A Critical Review of Habit Learning and the Basal Ganglia.
Ashby, F. G., Turner, B. O., & Horvitz, J. C. (2010). Cortical and Basal Ganglia Contributions to Habit Learning and Automaticity.
Yamada, K., & Toda, K. (2023). Habit Formation Viewed as Structural Change in the Behavioral Network.
Bhagavad Gītā 3.33, 6.35, and 18.30.
If Chapter 28 shows how repeated thoughts, emotions, and biases become trained into both saṁskāras and neural habit, the next question is why the mind does not process everything in the same way at all times. Why is it clear and spacious in one state, restless and overloaded in another, and dull or inert in a third? Why does the same person think, feel, and decide so differently depending on their inner condition?
The next chapter turns to Chapter 29 — The Guṇas and Cognitive Load: how Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas shape our mental processing speed and clarity. Bhagavad Gita Chapter 14 presents the three guṇas as fundamental qualities influencing mind and behavior: Sattva as illuminating and clarity-producing, Rajas as restless and desire-driven, and Tamas as ignorance-producing, inertial, and deluding.
Modern cognitive science offers a useful parallel: working memory and attention are limited-capacity systems, and mental processing changes under differing loads of control, distraction, and automaticity. Reviews of working memory describe it as a limited-capacity system central to thought and goal-directed behavior, while later reviews emphasize its close link to attention and control.
This makes the bridge especially fruitful.
A sāttvik state can be read as one of relative clarity and lower internal interference; a rājasic state as one of agitation, urgency, and overloaded striving; and a tāmasic state as one of inertia, dullness, and obscured processing.
Chapter 29 therefore moves from the physical grooves of habit to the changing qualities of consciousness itself — asking not only what has been trained into the mind, but what mode the mind is operating in right now.
