Our Brains Cheat During Learning

By Roland Piquepaille

For example, when learning skills such as arithmetic, the brain doesn't necessarily reach back into its basic calculating skills for each problem, suggested the researchers who made the finding. Rather, the brain builds a repertoire of rote responses to frequently encountered problems that it can use to save time and effort, they said.

Put anatomically, the new experiments suggest the human brain might rapidly circumvent deliberative processing in higher brain regions, called the cortex, as it learns to respond appropriately and automatically to stimuli such as repeated tasks.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain and detect regions where brain activity was reduced when performing repetitive tasks, a concept named "neural priming."

For more information about fMRI, check this Wikipedia page. And to see what you can do with it, here is a spectacular cut-away view of a visualization of five integrated brain map data sources: cortex, arteries, veins, fMRI and stimulation mapping sites (dots) Credit: University of Washington, Seattle).

As I mentioned earlier, the neural priming concept also works with people affected by amnesia.

"What's fascinating about neural priming is that it occurs even in people with amnesia, who can't even remember events or objects," said Ian Dobbins, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Duke University. "They also show this increase in performance with repetition despite being unable to consciously remember the previous encounters," Dobbins said. "Such findings have been the basis for the belief that we have separate systems for certain types of memory that function independently."

Now, what can we expect from these findings? Not something you'll be able to buy to learn quicker a foreign language.

The new findings could enrich understanding of the learning and memory process, he said. Also, the discovery opens new research pathways to understanding the neural machinery underlying the object-related deliberative strategy of processing information versus the automatic strategy, and how the brain rapidly switches from one to the other.

This research work has been published by Nature under the name "Cortical activity reductions during repetition priming can result from rapid response learning" and you can read the abstract here.

Sources: Duke University news release, March 8, 2004; Nature, February 29, 2004; and various websites