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Pausing is a key element to learning anything, according to new research.
A new study from the National Institute of Health indicates that our brains retain the memory of a technique that we practice a few seconds faster by resting a little. The findings will help steer the re-learning skills therapies for patients who are recovering from crippling effects of strokes or other brain injuries, the team hopes. However, they should be widely applicable to anyone trying to acquire a new skill that involves physical movement.
Slowly but surely, we succeed
"Everyone thinks you need to" practice, practice, practice "to learn something new.Instead, we found that resting, early and often, could be just as essential for learning as for practice, "said Leonardo G. Cohen, MD, Ph.D., senior researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke at NIH and a senior paper author.
"Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments help patients recover from the crippling effects of stroke and other neurological damage by explaining the strategies they use to" relearn "lost skills."
Lead researcher Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cohen's lab, said she believed, like many of her colleagues, that our brains needed long periods of rest (sleep) to reinforce new memories. This included memories badociated with learning a new skill. However, after seeing brain wave recordings of healthy volunteers participating in ongoing learning and memory experiences at the NIH Clinical Center, she began to question that view.
These brain waves were recorded in right-handed volunteers with magnetoencephalography, a very sensitive scanning technique. Each participant was sitting on a chair facing a computer screen under a long, cone-shaped brain scanner cap. The volunteers were shown a series of numbers on the screen and then asked to type the numbers as many times as possible in 10 seconds with their left hand. Then they took a 10-second break and started typing again; each participant repeated this cycle of practice and rest 35 times.
The team said the volunteers' performance improved considerably during the test, stabilizing around the 11th cycle. However, an important finding was "when" this improvement seemed to occur in the brain.
"I noticed that participants' brainwaves seemed to change a lot more during rest periods than during typing sessions," said Dr. Bönstrup. "It gave me the idea to look a lot closer when the learning was really happening. Was it during practice or rest?
The team explains that the data show that the participants' performances increased mainly during the short rest periods and not during the strikes. These rest enhancements were added together to create the overall gains found by each volunteer during the trial. In addition, the total improvements observed during these breaks were much greater than what the volunteers experienced over time (the trial lasted two days) – the latter point suggests that the short breaks played a role as well. important in learning than in practice.
In examining brainwaves, Dr. Bönstrup found that participants' brains were busy consolidating their memories during these short rest periods. The team reports that there have been changes in participants' beta rhythms, correlated with improvements made by volunteers during rest periods. Further badysis reveals that changes in beta oscillations occurred mainly in right hemispheres and with neural networks connecting the frontal and parietal lobes. These structures are badociated with movement planning and control. These changes only occurred during breaks and were the only brainwave patterns correlated with performance.
"Our findings suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitation treatments in patients with stroke or at the time of stroke. piano learning in normal volunteers, "said Dr. Cohen.
"The question of whether these results apply to other forms of learning and to the training of memory remains an open question."
Dr. Cohen's team plans to explore in greater detail the role of these early rest periods in learning and memory.
The document "A quick form of offline consolidation in learning skills" was published in the journal Current biology.
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