Learning Rewires the Brain

 

Practice makes perfect

 

Doing something over and over again doesn’t just make it easier. It actually changes the brain.

That may not come as a surprise. But exactly how that process happens has long been a mystery. 

Scientists have known that the brain continues to develop through our teenage years.

But these experts used to think that those changes stopped once the brain matured.  No more!

 

Recent data have shown that it’s not just nerve cells that shift and change as we learn. Other brain cells also get into the act.

 

Scientists have begun unlocking the secrets of how we learn, not only in huge blocks of tissue, but even within individual cells.

 

Scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.  analyzed data from previous studies that probed which regions of the brain turn on when people learn new tasks and discovered that areas of the brain that allow people to pay attention became most active as someone began a new task. But those attention areas became less active over time.  Meanwhile, areas of the brain linked with daydreaming and mind-wandering became more active as people became more familiar with a task.

 

As we learn something new, cells that send and receive information about the task become more and more efficient. It takes less effort for them to signal the next cell about what’s going on. In a sense, the neurons become wired together.

 

As cells in a brain area related to some task became more efficient, they used less energy to chat. This allowed more neurons in the “daydreaming” region of the brain to rev up their activity.

 

Neurons can signal to several neighbors at once. For example, one neuron might transmit information about the location of a baseball pitch that’s flying toward you. Meanwhile, other neurons alert your muscles to get ready to swing the bat. When those neurons fire at the same time, connections between them strengthen. That improves your ability to connect with the ball.