14 DAY TRIAL // Folk wisdom shows that if you're dumb, you'll get dumber.
And indeed, if the brain is already teaming with information, the new one will stuck very quickly. This is the conclusion of a research made on rats that could help explain human learning.
The research team trained lab rats to link six feeding spots with six different food flavors.
Following six weeks of training, in which the animals formed smell-location pairs of brain connections, these rats were able to learn new flavor-place connections in a single test, which is an extremely short period of time."You could be very literal and liken it to you learning where the Indian restaurant is, where the Thai restaurant is, where the curry house is and so on," said study team member Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "Then when a new restaurant opens it's easy to slot it into your framework."
The trained rats could remember the new stocked associations for at least two weeks. Initially, the information was maneuvered by the brain nucleus named the hippocampus.
But the team eliminated this organ 48 hours after the experiments and remarked that the rats displayed the new knowledge.
This means that the new information got already stuck as stable memories in the neocortex, the outermost brain layer involved in mammals in learning and cognitive functions. "The neocortex was able to incorporate new information rapidly," remarked Larry Squire of the Virginia Medical Center, not involved in the research.
Previous researches showed that rats normally need at least a month to learn new data. The new research could explain some aspects in human memory impairments. "I think we need to think about this aspect and thinking about relating information to what people already know as a behavioral thing, as a cognitive thing, and not just assume that it's all to do with pharmacology. And even if it is, then we [have] to think about neocortical neurons and synapses, and not just hippocampal ones," said Morris.