Category: Learning

Scientists watched memories physically forming in the brain.

Learning can change the physical structure of the brain within hours.

The finding is remarkable because neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to reorganise itself — was thought to be a much slower process.

Brain scans have now revealed that areas of the parietal cortex can change within hours.

The findings also suggest that memories are stored locally, rather than in ‘memory banks’.

The study involved people being given a type of brain scan called diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI).

This technique measures how water molecules are arranged in the body.

The neuroscientists used this tool to see how water moved in the brain as people learned new things.

The study’s authors conclude:

“We detected neocortical plasticity as early as 1 hour after
learning and found that it was learning specific, enabled correct recall, and overlapped with memory-related functional activity.

These microstructural changes persisted over 12 hours.

Our results suggest that new traces can be rapidly encoded into the parietal cortex, challenging views of a slow-learning neocortex.”

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• 10 Strategies Proven To Supercharge Learning — Backed By Psychology (P)

The study was published in the journal Science (Brodt et al., 2018).

An extra 20 minutes can really help you properly absorb new information.

Overlearning could be the key to locking in new information.

The conclusions comes from a study in which people continued to learn a task 20 minutes after they had already mastered it.

The extra 20 minutes were vital to locking in those performance gains.

Continuing to practice — even after you have stopped improving — protects the learning.

Professor Takeo Watanabe, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These results suggest that just a short period of overlearning drastically changes a post-training plastic and unstable [learning state] to a hyperstabilized state that is resilient against, and even disrupts, new learning.”

Usually, new learning can be disrupted by any subsequent learning, studies show.

For effective learning, the study’s authors recommend these three points:

1. Overlearning cements training quickly. However, be aware that overlearning one subject can interfere with similar learning that follows.
2. Don’t try to to learn anything afterwards. If you don’t overlearn something, it can interfere with what you have just learned.
3. Two tasks can be learned without interference as long as there is a few hours between them.

In the research 183 people were presented with a series of images for learning.

Those that overlearned — they carried on learning after mastery — laid down stronger memories than those who did not overlearn.

Those who did not overlearn were likely to see memory interference from a subsequent task.

However, if there was a gap of a few hours in between bouts of learning, one task did not then degrade the performance on the other.

Professor Watanabe concluded:

“If you want to learn something very important, maybe overlearning is a good way.

If you do overlearning, you may be able to increase the chance that what you learn will not be gone.”

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• 10 Strategies Proven To Supercharge Learning — Backed By Psychology (P)

The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Shibata et al., 2017).