When you start learning how to do something new, like playing a musical instrument, the simplest tasks can feel difficult. But as you gain experience, you play with ease and without conscious thought. Researchers are mapping the signals that correlate with adaptive behavior and learning.
Your brain is processing new sensations from the outside world — how the instrument feels, sounds, looks — and making decisions, based on those sensory signals, on what your muscles should do next. But practice makes perfect, right? As you gain experience, you hear the subtleties of the music and feel the strings with less effort; your fingers start moving around the fretboard with ease and seemingly without conscious thought.
«We get better at something, more experienced, and it becomes more like a reflex rather than something we think about,» said neuroengineer Garrett Stanley, who does play music but is more interested in the neuronal processes underlying this adaptive behavior, whether that means effortlessly playing a guitar, or getting dressed, or avoiding danger, or any useful behavior learned from experience.
«Adaptive behavior in a constantly changing sensory environment is not only useful when you’re learning a new hobby,» added Stanley, professor and McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. «It’s crucial to survival.»
With that in mind, Stanley’s lab closely studied the neural signaling that correlates with adaptive behavior in mice, and what they found could be the first step toward new strategies to improve and speed up learning. The research, published Jan. 27 in Nature Communications, suggests that an area of the brain traditionally thought to be a basic sensory signaling center — the primary somatosensory cortex — plays a deeper role in decision making, and is part of an adaptive framework in the brain that facilitates flexible behavior as individuals gain experience.
Christian Waiblinger, postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, described the primary somatosensory cortex, or S1, as an «earlier» region of the brain, where tactile stimulus from the outside world arrives. «S1 is specifically thought to pre-process stimuli in a basic way,» Waiblinger said. «It hasn’t traditionally been associated with more complex neural processes that relate to long-term adaptive strategies.»
But scientists have long speculated that this earlier region might play a key role in higher-level functions, and that it is part of a larger framework spanning different brain structures. It’s an idea that remained mostly conceptual and theoretical, with little experimental evidence to back it up. The Stanley lab now has some evidence.
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Materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology. Original written by Jerry Grillo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.