(April 20, 2011) The “flexibility” of a person’s brain — how
much different areas of the brain link up in different combinations — can be
used to predict how fast someone will learn, according to research by an
international team from Oxford University, UC Santa Barbara, and UNC Chapel
Hill.
The team ran an experiment over 3
sessions in which 18 volunteers had to push a series of buttons as fast as
possible. They then divided functional MRI images of each volunteer’s brain
into 112 different regions and analyzed how these different areas were active
together while they performed the task.
They found that people with more
“flexible” brains, whose brain regions switched active areas more often, were
faster at learning the motor tasks.
“It’s the first time that anyone
has defined this concept of ‘flexibility’ in the brain: how brain regions
‘light up’ together in different combinations. We’ve been able to show that how
much these areas ‘swap partners’ in one session can predict how fast people
will perform a task in a later session,” said Dr Mason Porter of Oxford
University’s Mathematical Institute, an author of the report. “It suggests that
in order to learn, the networks of our brains have to be flexible.”