Visual Turn

Natural brain state is primed to learn | New Scientist

STUDYING for an exam? Begin by thinking your way into a learning state.

Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. “But no one has looked at the preparedness state,” says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner.”

Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.

Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. “Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response,” suggests Gabrieli.

To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants’ memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. “There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task,” Gabrieli says.

Original paper here.

This will be a fascinating line of research to follow. What conditions create that state of readiness in the first place? What conditions inhibit it? How could we identify this kind of readiness behaviorially? While it would be premature to draw conclusions about how this applies to classroom practice, it certainly does raise some interesting possibilities about what activities do (or do not) promote this state of readiness.

— Visual Turn

Source: fuckyeahneuroscience