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posted by mrcoolbp on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the simon-says-don't-overthink-it dept.

MedicalXpress is reporting on new research into how our neural systems learn new skills. Led by UC Santa Barbara's Scott Grafton and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University, they sought to answer the question: "Why are some people able to master a new skill quickly while others require extra time or practice?"

Researches used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to identify regions of the brain involved with learning and new skill acquisition while subjects played a simple game. Rather than focus on specific areas of the brain for short periods of time, the researchers took a more holistic approach, examining the process of learning a more complex skill over a longer period of time.

Some of the results were surprising. Interestingly, using more of your brain won't help you learn more quickly; instead, as "counterintuitive as it may seem, the participants who showed decreased neural activity learned the fastest."

From the article:

The researchers discovered that the neural activity in the quickest learners was different from that of the slowest. Their analysis provides new insight into what happens in the brain during the learning process and sheds light on the role of interactions between different regions. The findings, which appear online today in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that recruiting unnecessary parts of the brain for a given task—similar to overthinking the problem—plays a critical role in this important difference.

At UCSB's Brain Imaging Center, study participants played a simple game while their brains were scanned with fMRI. The technique measures neural activity by tracking the flow of blood in the brain, highlighting which regions are involved in a given task.

Participants responded to a sequence of color-coded notes by pressing the corresponding button on a hand-held controller.

The study continued with participants practicing at home while researchers monitored their activity remotely. Subjects returned to the Brain Imaging Center at two-, four- and six-week intervals for new scans that demonstrated how well practice had helped them master the skill. Completion time for all participants dropped over the course of the study but did so at different rates. Some picked up the sequences immediately, while others gradually improved over the six-week period.

"Previous brain imaging research has mostly looked at skill learning over—at most—a few days of practice, which is silly," said Grafton, who is also a member of UCSB's Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies. "Who ever learned to play the violin in an afternoon? By studying the effects of dedicated practice over many weeks, we gain insight into never before observed changes in the brain. These reveal fundamental insights into skill learning that are akin to the kinds of learning we must achieve in the real world."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:10PM (#167987)

    It should be noted that this is nothing new. I remember reading something like this in my biology or anatomy book years back. When first learning a skill there is plenty of visible brain activity going on. After mastering the skill there is much less brain activity going on when performing the given task. Again, this has been known a very long time and this 'new' research is simply rehashing what has already been well known for a while now. The only story here is how can someone get so much recognition for pointing out what we already know.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:42PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:42PM (#167997) Journal

    Isn't the point that people with brains that does multiple processing of the same input will have more neural coordination to handle than people with less neural capacity? Thus people with more neurons will learn slower than people with less. But that may also mean that the former group can exploit that skill in more ways later on?

    That after learning is done neural activity will go down is quite well known. But that's another subject.

    Take home: Relax, scale the skill down and then improve?

  • (Score: 1) by m2o2r2g2 on Thursday April 09 2015, @04:17AM

    by m2o2r2g2 (3673) on Thursday April 09 2015, @04:17AM (#168163)

    I seem to recall the process was called perceptual chunking (or just chunking [wikipedia.org]).

    As you get good at something, you don't need to concentrate on every detail (think driving etc).

    The people who showed less activity probably already had a foundation in a similar (enough) type of activity, that this was just a tweak of existing skill rather than learning a new skill. So the study is almost comparing apples and oranges.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:36AM (#168202)

      I think it's well established that someone that knows how to play one musical instrument will generally learn a second instrument faster than someone trying to learn that instrument with no prior instrumental experience.