Why are some people able to master a new skill quickly while others require extra time or practice? To find the answer, researchers designed a study that measured the connections between different brain regions while participants learned to play a simple game.
The researchers discovered that the neural activity in the quickest learners was different from that of the slowest. Their analysis provides new insight into what happens in the brain during the learning process and sheds light on the role of interactions between different regions.
The findings, which appear online in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that recruiting unnecessary parts of the brain for a given task—similar to overthinking the problem—plays a critical role in this important difference.
“It’s useful to think of your brain as housing a very large toolkit,” said Scott Grafton, a professor in University of California–Santa Barbara’s department of psychological and brain sciences.
