14 DAY TRIAL // Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) neuroscientists say that they now know more about how the brain behaves when certain tasks become routine. Their study was focused on observing how the frequency of brain waves shifts once a newly-learned task is mastered.
This ability the human brain has, of diverting resources from processes it has already performed successfully in the past to new challenges, is absolutely remarkable. Trivial action that have been performed before are run simply as background processes after a while.
Researchers are very interested in knowing exactly how this shift in priority occurs, so numerous studies have been conducted on the issue up until now. Still, the much-awaited breakthrough failed to arrive. The new MIT research finally provides a breath of fresh air into this field of research.
The team decided to analyze brain waves, in hopes that these rhythmic fluctuations in the overall electrical activity the brain displays would lead them to their goal. The role played by brain waves in processes such as memory and learning has never been analyzed in detail.
What the neuroscientists discovered was that two of these rhythms tend to undergo a switch at the moment an activity is learned, or mastered. As such, this change may play a critical role in underlying the way in which the brain learns habitual behavior.
Details of the new study were published in this week's issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The work was carried out on lab rats, which were placed in a maze, and left to their own devices until they learned its corridors.
While the animals were roaming the maze, experts surveyed brain regions that control habit formation. MIT experts learned that brain waves in these areas were fast and chaotic when the rats were first exposed to the maze. As the animals learned, the brain waves became slower and synchronized.
MIT Institute professor Ann Graybiel, who was also the senior author of the PNAS paper, believes that this shift from chaotic to synchronized brain waves in these areas are an indicator that a certain behavior has been learned.
“Although there has been a lot of work on studying brain oscillations, there’s really no work looking at how oscillations in different frequency bands impact different parts of the learning process, and that’s what this paper does,” researcher Michael Frank comments.
The expert, who was not a part of the study, holds an appointment as an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at the Brown University.