Adult brains do not change in response to passive experience, but only change in response to what the individual actively attends to.

The finding

What the evidence shows

Attention does strongly gate adult brain change, and the monkey training studies behind this point are real, but the absolute version does not hold. In human experiments, a few hours of passive touch stimulation, with subjects told not to pay attention to it and free to read or walk around, still raised excitability in the touch area of the cortex and improved their ability to tell two points apart. The researchers describe the protocol as task-free and independent of attention, and report that focusing or distracting attention did not change the size of the improvement. Attention makes adult learning far more efficient, but it is not the only way an adult brain changes.