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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: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 08 2015, @10:34PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 08 2015, @10:34PM (#168025) Homepage Journal

    -board.

    Unfortunately, qwerty is "good enough for me".

    How many trillions of dollars of lost productivity have resulted from the qwerty keyboard?

    The real reason for it was that intuitively-arranged keys enabled one to type so fast that they jammed the crude mechanisms of the earliest mechanical typewriters.

    There is no doubt in my mind that even mechanical - manual - typewriters would have worked just fine with a better arrangement, given the quality of, say, 1970s manufacturing.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 08 2015, @11:21PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 08 2015, @11:21PM (#168039) Journal

    The hard part is getting a spare keyboard for laptops etc that have a different order of the keys. Or repaint them in a way that won't loose its print.

    I actually tested some calculation of a better layout and the numbers just screams out that a qwerty-board is horribly flawed. It's obvious that more common keys should be nearer the middle of the keyboard or a circle. But the keyboard put up some symmetries where the distances is the same. So should two keys with same frequency be close to the screen or closer to the wrists? The geometric distance is the same.

    Perhaps 3D-printed keyboards [studiofathom.com] is the way out the qwerty-board hegemony.