Privilege and the Plastic Brain: Why Some Mindsets Win Before the Race Begins
- Georgina Brown (hershe)
- Oct 7
- 5 min read
Imagine you’re at the starting line of life’s marathon.
Some of us are laced into Nike Vaporflys with cheering squads and protein bars.
Others?
Barefoot. In a fog. Holding a map printed upside down.
That’s not just a metaphor for privilege. It’s neuroscience.
The Brain Is Born to Adapt, Then It Prunes
Our brains arrive squishy, sponge-like, and gloriously open. I
n the first few years of life, they’re in hyperplasticity mode.
Every coo, every frown, every household rule and unspoken social cue gets hardwired in.
As Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb first proposed in 1949:
“Neurons that fire together wire together.” Stanford neuroscientist Carla Shatz later built on this, explaining that “neurons that fire out of sync, fail to link.”
This forms the basis of what we now understand as Hebbian learning, the brain’s way of strengthening neural circuits through repeated use. It’s how privilege, or self-doubt, becomes second nature.
By around age 7, the brain starts trimming away unused synaptic connections. Like a gardener pruning branches, it keeps the networks we use most and discards the rest.
Translation: what you’re exposed to early on, in terms of belief systems, expectations, opportunities, and even accents, becomes the foundation your brain builds on.
This is why psychologist and social researcher Dr. Bruce Perry says, "The brain is a historical organ. It stores your biography."
Privilege Begins in Neural Pathways
We often think of privilege as external, money, education, access.
But privilege also lives inside the brain. In the well-worn neural paths laid down when you were told:
“You can do anything.”
“People like us belong in rooms like that.”
“You’re a leader. Speak up.”
By contrast, for many others, early neural programming might sound more like:
“Don’t get above yourself.”
“That world isn’t for us.”
“People like us don’t do well in places like that.”
These beliefs aren’t just thoughts. They become entrenched neural biases.
Over time, they shape:
Risk tolerance
Ambition
Self-worth
Sense of safety in challenging authority
Willingness to dream big
As Chelsea Handler once put it (yes, I did get addicted to watching her on Netflix during COVID!): "
I'm a success because no one ever told me I couldn't be."
For millions, the opposite is true. And their brains adapted accordingly.
The Neurobiology of Exclusion: The Impact on Minoritised Groups
For women, racially minoritised people, disabled individuals, and LGBTQ+ communities, early messages often embed a different kind of wiring, one grounded in caution, fear, and protection.
Dr. Joy DeGruy’s work on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome shows how intergenerational trauma can wire the brain for survival rather than thriving.
Neuroscientist Dr. Pooja Lakshmin also highlights how systemic oppression can lead to chronic activation of the brain’s stress systems, dampening cognitive flexibility, creativity, and emotional regulation.
The result? The very environments that demand excellence often suppress the neural conditions that allow it to emerge.
Minoritised individuals may carry a double cognitive load: performing in the moment while simultaneously navigating bias, code-switching, or microaggressions.
This taxes the prefrontal cortex, our centre for reasoning, decision-making, and complex thinking. Over time, this can lead to burnout and self-doubt, not because of a lack of ability, but because of the neural cost of surviving inequality.
Privilege, in contrast, often gives the brain more space to think, to risk, and to grow.
Biology Meets Social Codes
Neuroscience researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has shown that children absorb social and emotional cues into the very networks responsible for decision-making and identity.
In other words, if you’re raised to read the room, charm authority figures, speak 'confidently but not arrogantly', and make eye contact at just the right duration, congratulations, that’s neural privilege.
You learned the codes early. And your brain made them automatic.
This is also what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls predictive coding, your brain builds templates for how the world works, and acts accordingly. If your template says "I’m safe here," you speak up. If it says "I’ll be punished or judged," you shrink.
The Mental Model of Money
Even our relationship with money is wired through early neural patterning. Neuroscientist and author Dr. Sarah McKay highlights how childhood experiences create “money scripts”, mental models encoded during a brain’s most malleable years that influence adult attitudes toward wealth, scarcity, risk, and reward.
Dr. Bruce Perry also notes that environments of chronic stress or unpredictability can cause the brain to prioritise immediate safety over long-term gain, which influences everything from saving habits to career aspirations.
Those raised in scarcity may develop hypervigilant neural pathways wired for protection and frugality. Meanwhile, children raised in secure, financially stable environments tend to form dopaminergic reward circuits that support risk-taking, innovation, and the belief that money will flow again.
In short? Our money mindset isn’t just financial, it’s neurological. And like everything else, it can be rewired. When it comes to money, whatever you believe, your brain makes true.
Something, popular science has termed the law of attraction. But it is deeply embedded in neural pathways and takes more than just a few thoughts and wishful thinking to rewire.
Mindset Isn’t Just Psychological. It’s Neurological.
The Growth Mindset movement, made famous by Carol Dweck, is based on the idea that our beliefs about ability shape our outcomes.
But those beliefs aren’t floating around in some self-help mist. They’re etched into the neural networks we built before we had the language to explain them.
If you grew up constantly praised for effort, given space to fail safely, and told your ideas mattered, your brain became wired for possibility.
If you were punished for failure, told to be quiet, or learned that safety lay in invisibility? Then of course your brain built different pathways.
So What Do We Do With This?
This isn’t about shame or blame. It’s about conscious rewiring.
At BARDO, we use the NeuroInclusive Maturity Model (NIMM) to help organisations:
Understand how early bias and privilege shape adult behaviours
Create psychologically safe cultures where rewiring can happen
Build habits, language and cues that activate growth mindsets for everyone, not just the pre-wired few
Creating psychologically safe cultures is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a neural necessity. According to the work of Amy Edmondson and David Rock, safety, the sense that we won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up, is what allows the brain to shift out of survival mode and into learning mode. When we feel safe, our prefrontal cortex comes online, enabling empathy, reasoning, and innovation. Without safety, the brain stays in its threat detection zone, governed by the amygdala, where risk-taking and perspective-taking shrink.
But this can’t just be about asking individuals from less privileged or minoritised backgrounds to rewire themselves to survive systems that weren’t built with them in mind. That’s the deficit model, and it’s both unfair and ineffective.
Instead, NIMM helps organisations look at the broader systems, structures, and social codes that need to change too. It’s not just about nudging minoritised individuals brains into different behaviours. It’s about redesigning the cultural operating systems that privilege some neural maps over others and helping us all to rewire to be aware of those to stop the cycle of exclusion.
With NIMM, leaders learn how to:
Reframe performance, potential, and leadership through a neuro-inclusive lens
Redesign meetings, policies, and language to promote equity and shared cognitive ease
Replace shame-based cultures with habit-building ones
Because true inclusion doesn’t just ask people to survive the system. It changes the system so more people can thrive.
We believe inclusion isn’t just a policy. It’s a neurobiological intervention.
Privilege may be baked in. But so is neuroplasticity.
With intention, repetition, and the right conditions, we can all rewire.
Final Thought
It’s not that the privileged are better.
It’s that their brains were trained to believe they belonged.
The work of inclusion is to make that true for everyone.
Because while the race might have started unfairly, the brain gives us a way to redraw the map.
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