New Reason To "Sleep On It": Study Shows Importance Of Sleep To Memory Consolidation And Task Performance School kids may be cutting back on sleep to finish ever mounting piles of homework, but it could be a self-defeating strategy. Harvard Medical School researchers have found that people who stay up all night after learning and practicing a new task show little improvement in their performance. And the study suggests that no amount of sleep on the following two nights can make up for the toll taken by the initial all-nighter.
Study Describes Brain Changes During Learning A new study by brain scientists at Brown University provides evidence that learning engages a brain process called long-term potentiation (LTP), which in turn strengthens synapses in the cerebral cortex. The study provides the strongest evidence to date to support the 25-year-old hypothesis, generally accepted by neuroscientists, that learning uses LTP to produce changes in the connections (synapses) between brain cells (neurons) that are necessary to acquire and store new information, said lead author Mengia-Seraina Rioult-Pedotti. Neuroscientists also theorize that higher forms of learning occur in the cerebral cortex. Evidence from the study supports that theory.
Brain Structure May Play Role in Children's Ability To Learn To Read Brain structure and hand preference may be as important as environment in influencing a child's ability to learn to read, according to a University of Florida Brain Institute study. The seven-year study of 39 Alachua County students from kindergarten to sixth grade indicates that while children from a lower socioeconomic class may be at risk for reading failure, the detrimental effects of environment are greatly increased in children with unusual brain asymmetry.
Brains Of Those In Certain Professions Shown To Have More Synapses Education not only makes a person smarter, it may generate a specific type of synapse in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, Illinois and Russian neuroscientists say.
Learning And Skilled Performance Use Different Brain Circuits The parts of the brain that enable you to do a familiar task are different from those that learn that task, a new study confirms. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reached this conclusion after obtaining positron emission tomography (PET) images of people tracing maze patterns. PET is one of the techniques that can reveal which areas of the brain are active. "Our volunteers used some areas of the brain to learn the maze task but shifted to other areas after practice," says lead researcher Steven E. Petersen, Ph.D., professor of neurology, neurobiology and radiology.
Instant Replay: Study Finds Potential Mechanism For Building Long-Term Memory Princeton scientists have discovered a key mechanism the brain uses to transfer short-term memories into permanent storage, a finding that could have broad implications for understanding how the brain maintains long-term stability. Researchers led by neuroscientist Joe Tsien found that the brain appears to have a system of repeatedly replaying and reinforcing the same cellular event that led to the initial formation of a memory. The reinforcement is critical for creating the cell-to-cell connections that constitute long-term memories, the researchers found.
