New research on the brain’s capacity to learn suggests there’s more to it than practice makes perfect.
A music-training study finds evidence to distinguish the parts of the brain that account for individual talent from the parts that are activated through training.
The research involved brain-imaging studies of 15 young adults with little or no musical background who were scanned before and after they underwent six weeks of musical training. Participants were required to learn simple piano pieces.
Brain activity in certain areas changed after learning, indicating the effect of training. But the activity in a different set of brain structures, measured before the training session had started, predicted which test subjects would learn quickly or slowly.
