How does learning affect the brain

A college graduate who also continues to learn in formal educational settings is 2. But informal activity helps, too. Keeping your mind active keeps arterial aging, immune aging, and even accidents in check and has a RealAge benefit of making you 1. While it's true that we live in an age when we're as obsessed with our bodies as Michael Mercury.

Regarding what can be done to promote brain health including memory, research suggests the importanc Practicing or rehearsing repeatedly activates your neurons and makes you learn.

So, the question is, how can you help your neurons to create and strengthen their connections? Here, we present two strategies that appear to be more compatible with how your brain works and could help you learn better.

Because the connections between your neurons need to be activated multiple times to become stronger and more efficient, a first and crucial strategy is to repeatedly activate them. As a baby, you were not able to speak and walk within 1 day: you practiced a lot. However, it is important to note that only reading or glancing at your arithmetic tables will not be that helpful in connecting your neurons. You might also find it quite disengaging and boring.

To create the connections between your neurons, you need to retrieve the arithmetic tables from your memory. In other words, you have to try recall the answer yourself to activate your connections. We are not saying that this is easy to do! Remember, learning something new is like hiking in a bush with no designated trail, you will probably walk slowly at first, but if you keep hiking, trails will start forming and eventually you will be walking on well-beaten tracks.

Besides, when you do try to recall what you have learned and make a mistake, it can help you identify gaps in your learning and give you an indication of which trail still needs to be worked on. Scientists have also noted that performing tests or exams can help you remember information better than studying alone [ 4 ]. For example, if you study your arithmetic tables interspersed with test periods, you will probably perform better on your final test than if you had only studied.

The tests require that you retrieve the information from the neurons in which the information is stored, thus activating your connections and contributing to their strengthening. The point is thus to practice retrieval in an engaging way. There are different strategies that you could try at home, for example answering practice questions or using flashcards. These should improve learning more than re-reading or listening to lectures as long as you do not flip the flashcard over before recalling the answer!

Other strategies include preparing questions to ask to a classmate or a parent as well as redoing tests or exercises. Use your imagination! What you need to remember is that first, for your neurons to strengthen their connections, you need to retrieve the information and avoid just reading or listening to the answer.

Second, you should plan a way to get feedback to know whether you got something correct or incorrect. Do not be discouraged if you face challenges, this is a natural step of the learning process taking place in your brain! Now that you know that neurons need to be activated repeatedly for learning to occur and that it means retrieving information , you probably wonder how often you should practice. Scientists who study the learning brain observed that breaks and sleep between learning periods enhance learning and minimize forgetting [ 5 ].

It therefore seems better to retrieve often within spaced practice sessions, as opposed to a massed practice practicing a task continuously without rest. For instance, instead of studying or doing homework for 3 h, after which you would probably feel exhausted anyway, you could separate this learning period into three 1-h periods or even into six half-an-hour periods.

Synapse overproduction and loss is a fundamental mechanism that the brain uses to incorporate information from experience. It tends to occur during the early periods of development. In the visual cortex—the area of the cerebral cortex of the brain that controls sight—a person has many more synapses at 6 months of age than at adulthood.

This is because more and more synapses are formed in the early months of life, then they disappear, sometimes in prodigious numbers. The time required for this phenomenon to run its course varies in different parts of the brain, from 2 to 3 years in the human visual cortex to 8 to 10 years in some parts of the frontal cortex. Some neuroscientists explain synapse formation by analogy to the art of sculpture. Classical artists working in marble created a sculpture by chiseling away unnecessary bits of stone until they achieved their final form.

The nervous system sets up a large number of connections; experience then plays on this network, selecting the appropriate connections and removing the inappropriate ones. What remains is a refined final form that constitutes the sensory and perhaps the cognitive bases for the later phases of development.

The second method of synapse formation is through the addition of new synapses—like the artist who creates a sculpture by adding things together until the form is complete. Unlike synapse overproduction and loss,. This process is not only sensitive to experience, it is actually driven by experience.

Synapse addition probably lies at the base of some, or even most, forms of memory. As discussed later in this chapter, the work of cognitive scientists and education researchers is contributing to our understanding of synapse addition.

The role of experience in wiring the brain has been illuminated by research on the visual cortex in animals and humans. In adults, the inputs entering the brain from the two eyes terminate separately in adjacent regions of the visual cortex. Subsequently, the two inputs converge on the next set of neurons.

People are not born with this neural pattern. But through the normal processes of seeing, the brain sorts things out. Neuroscientists discovered this phenomenon by studying humans with visual abnormalities, such as a cataract or a muscle irregularity that deviates the eye.

If the eye is deprived of the appropriate visual experience at an early stage of development because of such abnormalities , it loses its ability to transmit visual information into the central nervous system.

When the eye that was incapable of seeing at a very early age was corrected later, the correction alone did not help—the afflicted eye still could not see. When researchers looked at the brains of monkeys in which similar kinds of experimental manipulations had been made, they found that the normal eye had captured a larger than average amount of neurons, and the impeded eye had correspondingly lost those connections.

This phenomenon only occurs if an eye is prevented from experiencing normal vision very early in development. The period at which the eye is sensitive corresponds to the time of synapse overproduction and loss in the visual cortex. Out of the initial mix of overlapping inputs, the neural connections that belong to the eye that sees normally tend to survive, while the connections that belong to the abnormal eye wither away.

When both eyes see normally, each eye loses some of the overlapping connections, but both keep a normal number. In the case of deprivation from birth, one eye completely takes over. The later the deprivation occurs after birth, the less effect it has.

By about 6 months of age, closing one eye for weeks on end will produce no effect whatsoever. The critical period has passed; the connections have already sorted themselves out, and the overlapping connections have been eliminated.

This anomaly has helped scientists gain insights into normal visual development. By overproducing synapses then selecting the right connections, the brain develops an organized wring diagram that functions optimally. The brain development process actually uses visual information entering from outside to become more precisely organized than it could with intrinsic molecular mechanisms alone.

This external information is even more important for later cognitive development. The more a person interacts with the world, the more a person needs information from the world incorporated into the brain structures. Synapse overproduction and selection may progress at different rates in different parts of the brain Huttenlocher and Dabholkar, In the primary visual cortex, a peak in synapse density occurs relatively quickly.

In the medial frontal cortex, a region clearly associated with higher cognitive functions, the process is more protracted: synapse production starts before birth and synapse density continues to increase until 5 or 6 years of age.

The selection process, which corresponds conceptually to the main organization of patterns, continues during the next 4—5 years and ends around early adolescence. This lack of synchrony among cortical regions may also occur upon individual cortical neurons where different inputs may mature at different rates see Juraska, , on animal studies. After the cycle of synapse overproduction and selection has run its course, additional changes occur in the brain.

They appear to include both the modification of existing synapses and the addition of entirely new synapses to the brain. Research evidence described in the next section suggests that activity in the nervous system associated with learning experiences somehow causes nerve cells to create new synapses. Unlike the process of synapse overproduction and loss, synapse addition and modification are lifelong processes, driven by experience. This process is probably not the only way that information is stored in the brain, but it is a very important way that provides insight into how people learn.

Alterations in the brain that occur during learning seem to make the nerve cells more efficient or powerful. Animals raised in complex environments have a greater volume of capillaries per nerve cell—and therefore a greater supply of blood to the brain—than the caged animals, regardless of whether the caged animal lived alone or with companions Black et al. Capillaries are the tiny blood vessels that supply oxygen and other nutrients to the brain. In this way experience increases the overall quality.

Using astrocytes cells that support neuron functioning by providing nutrients and removing waste as the index, there are higher amounts of astrocyte per neuron in the complex-environment animals than in the caged groups. Overall, these studies depict an orchestrated pattern of increased capacity in the brain that depends on experience. Other studies of animals show other changes in the brain through learning; see Box 5. The weight and thickness of the cerebral cortex can be measurably altered in rats that are reared from weaning, or placed as adults, in a large cage enriched by the presence both of a changing set of objects for play and exploration and of other rats to induce play and exploration Rosenzweig and Bennett, These animals also perform better on a variety of problem-solving tasks than rats reared in standard laboratory cages.

Interestingly, both the interactive presence of a social group and direct physical contact with the environment are important factors: animals placed in the enriched environment alone showed relatively little benefit; neither did animals placed in small cages within the larger environment Ferchmin et al. Thus, the gross structure of the cerebral cortex was altered both by exposure to opportunities for learning and by learning in a social context.

Are the changes in the brain due to actual learning or to variations in aggregate levels of neural activity? Animals in a complex environment not only learn from experiences, but they also run, play, and exercise, which activates the brain. The question is whether activation alone can produce brain changes without the subjects actually learning anything, just as activation of muscles by exercise can cause them to grow. To answer this question, a group of animals that learned challenging motor skills but had relatively little brain activity was compared with groups that had high levels of brain activity but did relatively little learning Black et al.

There were four groups in all. What happened to the volume of blood vessels and number of synapses per neuron in the rats? Both the mandatory exercisers and the voluntary exercisers showed higher densities of blood vessels than either the cage potato rats or the acrobats, who learned skills that did not involve significant. How do rats learn? The objects are changed and rearranged each day, and during the changing time, the animals are put in yet another environment with another set of objects.

These two settings can help determine how experience affects the development of the normal brain and normal cognitive structures, and one can also see what happens when animals are deprived of critical experiences. After living in the complex or impoverished environments for a period from weaning to rat adolescence, the two groups of animals were subjected to a learning experience.

The rats that had grown up in the complex environment made fewer errors at the outset than the other rats; they also learned more quickly not to make any errors at all. In this sense, they were smarter than their more deprived counterparts. And with positive rewards, they performed better on complex tasks than the animals raised in individual cages.

It is clear that when animals learn, they add new connections to the wiring of their brains—a phenomenon not limited to early development see, e. But when the number of synapses per nerve cell was measured, the acrobats were the standout group. Learning adds synapses; exercise does not. Thus, different kinds of experience condition the brain in different ways. Synapse formation and blood vessel formation vascularization are two important forms of brain adaptation, but they are driven by different physiological mechanisms and by different behavioral events.

Learning specific tasks brings about localized changes in the areas of the brain appropriate to the task. For example, when young adult animals were. When they learned the maze with one eye blocked with an opaque contact lens, only the brain regions connected to the open eye were altered Chang and Greenough, When they learned a set of complex motor skills, structural changes occurred in the motor region of the cerebral cortex and in the cerebellum, a hindbrain structure that coordinates motor activity Black et al.

These changes in brain structure underlie changes in the functional organization of the brain. That is, learning imposes new patterns of organization on the brain, and this phenomenon has been confirmed by electro-physiological recordings of the activity of nerve cells Beaulieu and Cynader, Studies of brain development provide a model of the learning process at a cellular level: the changes first observed in rats have also proved to be true in mice, cats, monkeys, and birds, and they almost certainly occur in humans.