sarahness

Spontaneous brain activity measurably changes after a person learns a new task, researchers at Washington University Schoool of Medicine in St. Louis and hte University of Chieti, have discovered.

Active neurons

“Recent studies have shown that in the absence of any overt behavior, and even during sleep or anesthesia, the brain’s spontaneous activity is not random, but organized in patterns of correlated activity that occur in anatomically and functionally connected regions,” says senior author Maurizio Corbetta, M.D., Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology.

“The reasons behind the spontaneous activity patterns remain mysterious, but we have now shown that learning causes small changes in those patterns, and that these changes are behaviorally important.”

Researchers conducted the study by scanning the brain activity of 14 volunteers using functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. They scanned the brain before and after visual training (one to two hours a day for five to seven days learning) .

When the subjects rested at the start of the experiment, spontaneous activity in the two parts of the brain that are important to the visual task was either not linked or weakly correlated, with the two regions involved in the upcoming task only occasionally being active at the same time. After learning, though, each region was more likely to be active when the other region wasn’t. Subjects who were more successful at the task exhibited a higher degree of this “anti-correlation” between the two regions after learning.

“It’s as though these two brain systems are learning to get out of each other’s way,” says Corbetta. “After learning, the brain can identify the targets at a glance in a way that requires less direct attention and thus less interaction between the regions involved in the task,” said Corbetta.

This study is publishedin the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.