By: Inas Essa

Learning is such an active process of building mental models of the world by observing and exploring. This process includes interaction with phenomena, conversing and engaging with others, and making connections between new ideas and prior understandings.

In other words, learning is that dynamic process that occurs in a complex social environment and should not be limited to being perceived as something that happens on an individual level.

Although we know how it is important for us to grow and be more mature, what enhances this process is still a work in progress.

Focus!

A new study conducted on mice has shown that cognitive training that focuses on important factors and ignoring distractions enhances the brain’s information processing and enables the ability to, well, learn to learn.

“As any educator knows, merely recollecting the information we learn in school is hardly the point of an education,” says André Fenton, a professor of neural science at New York University and the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature. He adds, “Rather than using our brains to merely store information to recall later, with the right mental training, we can also ‘learn to learn,’ which makes us more adaptive, mindful, and intelligent”.

Memory Enhancement

How memory works and what enhances it has been a frequently studied field by researchers. Also, how neurons store the information gained from experience so that the same information can be recalled later. Yet, less is known about the underlying neurobiology part of “How do we learn to learn?”–the mechanisms our brains use to go beyond memorizing and utilizing past experiences in meaningful, new ways.

This understanding of such a complex process could lead to memory enhancement by highlighting new methods to enhance learning. Additionally, it could help in designing cognitive-behavioral therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders like anxiety, schizophrenia, and other forms of mental dysfunction.

The Experiment

In previous research on memory, scientists had shown that learning to avoid shock on a rotating arena requires using the hippocampus, which works as the brain’s memory and navigation center, as well as the persistent activity of a molecule crucial for maintaining increases in the strength of neuronal connections besides storing long-term memory.

In this new experiment, the researchers exposed some mice to a Cognitive Control Training (CCT) during which they were put on a slowly rotating arena and were trained to avoid the stationary location of a mild shock using stationary visual cues while ignoring irrelevant locations of the shock on the rotating floor.

Also, one control group learned the same place avoidance, but it did not have to ignore the irrelevant rotating locations. After that, through a series of experiments, the CCT mice were compared to the mice in the controlled groups.

The Benefits of Ignoring Distractions

Analysis of neural activity in the hippocampus during CCT confirmed that the mice were using relevant information to avoid shock and ignore the rotating distractions in the vicinity of the shock. Such a process of ignoring distractions was essential for the mice learning to learn as it allowed them to do new cognitive tasks better than the mice that did not receive CCT; this confirms that CCT persistently optimizes neural circuit information processing.

“The study shows that two hours of cognitive control training causes learning to learn in mice and that learning to learn is accompanied by improved tuning of a key brain circuit for memory,” explains Fenton. “Consequently, the brain becomes persistently more effective at suppressing noisy inputs and more consistently effective at enhancing the inputs that matter.”

References

nature.com

neurosciencenews.com/cognitive-control-learning

Teaching.berkeley.edu/what-is-learning

Hippocampus