Star Wars, Breaking Bad, and Neuroplasticity

I sat in a lecture hall at SUNY Oswego my senior year for a class called CRW 595: The Meaning of Life. It was taught by my favorite undergraduate professor, Bob O’Connor.

Bob was cool in a way that couldn’t be manufactured. He wore all black, circular glasses, and carried himself with a calm presence that made the room quiet when he spoke. Eventually, I later I learned he had written Buffalo Soldiers (1993), which was turned into a Hollywood film. He once joked that production didn’t go according to his vision, but he was grateful they let him be involved. He insisted we call him Bob.

The class itself was ambitious and reading heavy. We were assigned long, dense works that required serious attention. During one class, Bob gave us an unusual assignment: write your own obituary — how you would want to be remembered — and share it with the lecture hall if you chose.

Around that time, instead of working through the reading list, I was binge-watching Breaking Bad. Captivated by the anti-hero storyline, I wrote an obituary describing myself as a cocaine kingpin who went out in a fiery drug-smuggling boat accident. For context, I had never even seen cocaine in my life.

After I read it aloud, I got a few cheers from the bros, some eye rolls from others, and a long, slow “okay…” from Bob.

I decided to start reading more after that.  The course included some remarkable material including Well’s Invisible Man, Heller’s Catch 22, Orwell’s 1984, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The final required reading was The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

Campbell’s central idea is that stories across cultures and centuries share the same structure, what he called The Hero’s Journey. In myths, literature, and modern film, the same pattern appears repeatedly: a call to adventure, a mentor, a series of trials, confrontation with darkness, perceived failure, and transformation. George Lucas famously drew on Campbell’s work when developing Star Wars. Luke Skywalker’s story closely mirrors the Hero’s Journey: leaving home on Tatooine, meeting mentors like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, facing trials, and confronting the frightening truth about his father. Even Anakin Skywalker’s fall in Episode III follows the same mythic structure, though it leads to tragedy rather than redemption. Campbell argued that these recurring story patterns reflect something fundamental about human psychology. The themes resonate because they mirror how people experience challenge, conflict, and change. One of the earliest steps in Campbell’s model is “the call to adventure.” The call disrupts the ordinary world. It invites the hero into something unknown. Sometimes the hero resists it at first. Sometimes they ignore it entirely. But when the call is eventually answered, something new begins to unfold. What often gets overlooked is that answering the call is fundamentally a creative act.

The hero doesn’t yet know how the story will unfold. There is no step-by-step instruction or manual. Instead, the process requires improvisation, imagination, and experimentation. New solutions must be invented along the way and surprisingly for each new journey the Hero endures.

Creativity, in this sense, isn’t just about art or storytelling. It is the ability to generate new responses to unfamiliar challenges. It is the willingness to step outside familiar patterns and engage with uncertainty.

Modern neuroscience offers another lens for understanding this process: neuroplasticity.

For many years, medicine and science believed the brain was largely fixed after childhood. Personality traits, emotional patterns, and behavioral tendencies were thought to be relatively stable over time.

My understanding is that newer research shows something very different. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming and strengthening neural connections throughout life. The brain constantly adapts based on repeated thoughts, behaviors, and experiences.

Patterns of thinking and behavior are not simply abstract ideas but are supported by physical neural pathways in the brain. The more often a pathway is used, the stronger it becomes. Over time, repeated reactions, habits, and emotional responses can become deeply ingrained.

Here’s where creativity plays an important role in this process. When people encounter new problems and generate new responses, the brain is forced to build new connections. Novel experiences, experimentation, and learning stimulate neural flexibility. In other words, creative engagement with the world can literally reshape the brain.

This is part of why stories like Star Wars and Breaking Bad resonate so strongly. Both series explore how repeated choices, motivations, and pressures gradually shape identity.

Characters rarely transform in a single moment. Change usually happens incrementally decision by decision, circumstance by circumstance, reinforcing patterns that ultimately define who they become.

From mythological storytelling to modern neuroscience, the same theme appears again and again: patterns matter. The stories people tell, the challenges they respond to, and the habits they repeat all contribute to the pathways that shape the human mind.

And sometimes, it all begins with something as simple and as mysterious as answering a call.

Written by Nick Ristoff LMHC

https://www.naturallightcounseling.com/

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