Brainwaves Reveal When Students Are Learning From Their Teacher (M)

The brainwaves of undergraduate students and their instructor were monitored while they learned.

The brainwaves of undergraduate students and their instructor were monitored while they learned.


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This Type Of Learning Makes Old Brains Young Again (M)

“Remarkably, the cognitive scores increased to levels similar to undergraduates taking the same cognitive tests for the first time.” – Dr Rachel Wu

"Remarkably, the cognitive scores increased to levels similar to undergraduates taking the same cognitive tests for the first time." - Dr Rachel Wu


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The Secret To Deep Learning Is Reverse of Conventional Wisdom

Neuroscientists find that the key to learning fast and efficiently may be the opposite of conventional wisdom.

Neuroscientists find that the key to learning fast and efficiently may be the opposite of conventional wisdom.

People who learn quickest show the least neural activity, a study finds.

The research flies in the face of the common myth that the key to learning is trying harder and thinking it through.

Instead, quick learners in particular showed reduced brain activity in the frontal cortex, an area linked to conscious planning.

In other words: good learners don’t overthink what they are trying to learn.

Professor Scott Grafton, who led the study, said:

“It’s useful to think of your brain as housing a very large toolkit.

When you start to learn a challenging new skill, such as playing a musical instrument, your brain uses many different tools in a desperate attempt to produce anything remotely close to music.

With time and practice, fewer tools are needed and core motor areas are able to support most of the behavior.

What our laboratory study shows is that beyond a certain amount of practice, some of these cognitive tools might actually be getting in the way of further learning.”

In the study, participants were learning a simple game which involved playing sequences of notes.

Their brains were scanned at two-, four- and six week intervals to see how they were learning the task.

What the neuroscientists were interested in was which networks the brain recruited.

Dr Danielle Bassett, the study’s first author, explained:

“We weren’t using the traditional fMRI approach where you pick a region of interest and see if it lights up.

We looked at the whole brain at once and saw which parts were communicating with each other the most.”

Graphing the patterns of interactions, the researchers could examine the areas that were interacting:

“When network scientists look at these graphs, they see what is known as community structure.

There are sets of nodes in a network that are really densely interconnected to each other.

Everything else is either independent or very loosely connected with only a few lines.”

Professor Grafton said:

“Previous brain imaging research has mostly looked at skill learning over — at most — a few days of practice, which is silly.

Whoever 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.”

The researchers found that those who learned the quickest used the areas of the brain related to planning the least.

Professor Grafton said:

“It’s the people who can turn off the communication to these parts of their brain the quickest who have the steepest drop-off in their completion times.

It seems like those other parts are getting in the way for the slower learners.

It’s almost like they’re trying too hard and overthinking it.”

The research was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Bassett et al., 2015)

The Secret to Deeper Learning Most People Don’t Know

Study suggests way to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of any subject.

Study suggests way to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of any subject.

Arguing with yourself can be a highly productive exercise, a study finds.

Imagining both sides of the argument helps people reach a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the subject, the researchers found.

Ms Julia Zavala, the study’s first author, said:

“Envisioning opposing views leads to a more comprehensive examination of the issue.

Moreover, it impacts how people understand knowledge — constructing opposing views leads them to regard knowledge less as fact and more as information that can be scrutinized in a framework of alternatives and evidence.”

For the study, 60 students were told to write a 2-minute TV spot promoting one of a number of political candidates for office.

Beforehand, though, some were told to imagine a dialogue between two TV presenters discussing the candidates.

The results showed that imagining the dialogue led to more ideas included in the final assignment.

Students who engaged in a dialogue with themselves were more likely to:

  • link problems and solutions,
  • identify more criticisms of the opponent,
  • and integrate different problems into a framework of understanding.

Professor Deanna Kuhn, study co-author, said:

“These results support our hypothesis that the dialogic task would lead to deeper, more comprehensive processing of the two positions and hence a richer representation of each and the differences between them.”

Arguing with yourself also created a more sophisticated understanding of the subject, a separate study showed.

Ms Zavala said:

“The dialogue task, which took no more than an hour to complete, appeared to have a strong effect on students’ epistemological understanding.”

Professor Kuhn concluded:

“Everything possible should be done to encourage and support genuine discourse on critical issues, but our findings suggest that the virtual form of interaction we examined may be a productive substitute, at a time when positions on an issue far too often lack the deep analysis to support them.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Zavala et al., 2017).

3 Keys To Superior Learning That Lasts Longer

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

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

Overlearning could be the key to locking in new information, research finds.

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.”

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