Category: Learning

One cause of low learning ability is an imbalance of proteins in the hippocampus that can be corrected by cinnamon.

The common household spice cinnamon could be used to enhance learning ability, a new study reveals.

Some people seem to have more difficulties with learning than others.

Some lab mice are the same.

But when lab mice that were poor learners were fed cinnamon their learning improved, the researchers found.

Dr Kalipada Pahan, who led the study, said:

“This would be one of the safest and the easiest approaches to convert poor learners to good learners.”

One cause of a low ability to learn is thought to be an imbalance of proteins in the hippocampus, the part of the brain vital for memory and learning.

Cinnamon, though, is transformed by the body into sodium benzoate: a drug used to treat brain damage that rebalances critical proteins.

In the study, mice were fed cinnamon for a month.

The results showed that the poor learners improved dramatically in terms of their learning and memory.

Dr Pahan said:

“We have successfully used cinnamon to reverse biochemical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with poor learning.”

Cinnamon, though, did not have any effect on the mice who were already good learners.

Dr Pahan said:

“Individual difference in learning and educational performance is a global issue.

We need to further test this approach in poor learners. If these results are replicated in poor learning students, it would be a remarkable advance.”

Cinnamon has also been found in previous research to reverse changes related to Parkinson’s in the brains of mice.

Along the way, they have discovered the best type of cinnamon to use (Ceylon versus Chinese), Dr Pahan explained:

“Although both types of cinnamon are metabolized into sodium benzoate, we have seen that Ceylon cinnamon is much more pure than Chinese cinnamon, as the latter contains coumarin, a hepatotoxic (liver damaging) molecule.”

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology (Modi et al., 2016).

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The colour that boosted concentration was the reverse of what most people expected.

Brightly coloured rooms can boost your concentration, new research finds.

This is the exact opposite of what most people expect, according to the same research.

Two-thirds of people believe that a bright red room was linked to discomfort, depression and annoyance.

When psychologists tested it, though, they found that vivid reds and yellows enhanced students’ concentration.

Aseel Al-Ayash, the study’s first author, said:

“Bright colors can support students’ learning performance by positively affecting psychological and physiological states.

If the reading tasks are difficult, the vivid colour conditions may increase arousal to optimal levels.”

This was the exact reverse of what most expected, Ms Al-Ayash said:

“In general, most participants believed that pale colors with high whiteness would be appropriate color schemes in learning environments, because they are considered calm and relaxing.

However, the calmness and relaxation aspects may not help students to be alert and active.

They performed better in the vivid color conditions, because these colors have arousing properties that stimulate neural activity.

If the task is boring, a red condition may stimulate individuals and enhance their performance.”

The finding is consistent with a century-old psychological finding called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

This is simply the idea that people perform at their best when somewhat stimulated.

Too much and too little stimulation, though, tends to make people’s performance worse.

For the research participants read passages of text and had to answer questions afterwards.

They did this in six different rooms painted a variety of colours, including pale and vivid shades or red, blue and yellow.

The results showed that their reading comprehension was higher in the vividly painted red and yellow rooms.

The study was published in the journal Color Research and Application (Al-Ayash et al., 2016).

Learning a new route causes the brain to change its structure, a new study finds.

Brief navigational training is enough to change the hippocampus and how it is linked to other areas.

This is one of the first studies to suggest that learning really does cause changes to the brain’s structure.

Dr Tim Keller, the study’s first author, said:

“The hippocampus has long been known to be involved in spatial learning, but only recently has it been possible to measure changes in human brain tissues as synapses become modified during learning.

Our findings provide a better understanding of what causes the hippocampal changes and how they are related to communication across a network of areas involved in learning and representing cognitive maps of the world around us.”

For the study, people played a driving simulation game.

One group learned the same route over and over while another group learned 20 different routes.

Brain scans revealed that the hippocampi of those in the group that had learned the same route had changed.

The change was seen in the left posterior dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus central to spatial learning.

In addition, the connectivity between this region and others was increased.

Professor Marcel Just, the study’s co-author, said:

“The new discovery is that microscopic changes in the hippocampus are accompanied by rapid changes in the way the structure communicates with the rest of the brain.

We’re excited that these results show what re-wiring as a result of learning might refer to.

We now know, at least for this type of spatial learning, which area changes its structure and how it changes its communication with the rest of the brain.”

The study was published in the journal Neuroimage (Keller & Just, 2015).

Brain image from Shutterstock

Neuroscientists uncover the secret of how our brains learn new words.

The brain is able to learn words so quickly because it remembers how the whole word ‘looks’, a new study finds.

The researchers found that a small part of our brain is holistically tuned to recognising words as a whole, rather than as parts or through individual letters.

Dr Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at the Georgetown University Medical Center who led the study, said:

“We are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of words, as some researchers have suggested.

Instead, neurons in a small brain area remember how the whole word looks — using what could be called a visual dictionary,”

A part of the brain called the ‘visual word form area’ is vital to how we learn new words.

Close by in the visual cortex is the fusiform gyrus, an area which helps us recognise faces.

Dr Riesenhuber said:

“One area is selective for a whole face, allowing us to quickly recognize people, and the other is selective for a whole word, which helps us read quickly.”

Learn new words

For the study, 25 participants were asked to learn new words that were actually nonsense.

Their brains were scanned before and after the training to look at how it had changed.

The results showed that after learning the visual word form area began to respond to the nonsense words as though they were real words.

Dr Laurie Glezer, the study’s first authors, said:

“This study is the first of its kind to show how neurons change their tuning with learning words, demonstrating the brain’s plasticity.”

People with reading disabilities may find it easier to learn words as a whole, anecdotal evidence suggests, rather than breaking them down.

Dr Riesenhuber said:

“For people who cannot learn words by phonetically spelling them out — which is the usual method for teaching reading — learning the whole word as a visual object may be a good strategy.

The visual word form area does not care how the word sounds, just how the letters of the word look together.

The fact that this kind of learning only happens in one very small part of the brain is a nice example of selective plasticity in the brain.”

The study is published in The Journal of Neuroscience (Glezer et al., 2015).

Thinking child image from Shutterstock

Boost language learning with this tip.

Using gestures while trying to learn a new language can help boost memory, a new study finds.

The motor system, the part of the brain controlling movements, seems to be particularly important in language learning.

While many language learning systems already incorporate pictures to help people learn, this is one of the first studies to show the importance of gesture.

In the experiment, published in the journal Current Biology, participants tried to learn a made-up language called ‘Vimmish’, chosen so that people would never have heard it before (Mayer et al., 2015).

Groups were taught Vimmish, which sounds a bit like Italian, in a variety of ways to test which promoted the best recall.

Dr Katja Mayer, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“The subjects’ recollection was best in relation to terms they themselves had expressed using gestures.

When they heard the term and its translation and also observed a corresponding image, they were also better able to remember the translation.

By contrast, however, tracing a term or observing a gesture was no better than just hearing the term,”

The researchers found that gestures were slightly more helpful than images in helping people learn vocabulary.

The multisensory theory, which is supported by this study, is that the more senses are stimulated during learning, the better recall will be.

Professor Katharina von Kriegstein, who led the study, said

“If we’re on the phone with someone we know, for example, the areas of the brain responsible for facial recognition are active during the phone call.

It seems that the brain simulates the information not being captured by the eyes and creates it for itself,”

It may be that when different areas of the brain are recruited during learning, this helps memory.

Professor von Kriegstein said:

“That could well be so, but we don’t know how much the learning outcomes improve with the addition of more senses.

Ideally, however, the individual sensory impressions should match one another.

In other words, to learn the Spanish word for apple, the subject should make an apple gesture, taste an apple or look at a picture of an apple.

Language learning image from Shutterstock

How to learn while distracted as if you were totally focused.

Learning with distractions can be just as efficient as total focus, as long as the distractions are still there during recall, a new study finds.

Although distractions have long been thought detrimental to learning, two new experiments have tested what happens when people are also distracted as they try to recall what they’ve learnt.

Dr. Joo-Hyun Song, who led the study, explained:

“The underlying assumption people have is that divided attention is bad — if you divide your attention, your performance should get worse.

But learning has a later, skill-retrieval part.

People haven’t studied what’s the role of divided attention in memory recall later.”

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, looked at motor learning, the kind which is activated when playing sports, driving or anything which involves coordinating new movements (Song & Bedard, 2014).

People played a computer game in which they had to virtually reach to grab a target.

At the same time symbols streamed by underneath, which sometimes people were asked to count.

The results showed that those who were distracted from the motor task by also having to count symbols performed just as well as those whose attention was undivided, as long as they were distracted at both learning and recall.

People who were only distracted during learning, or only during recall, performed worse.

A second study showed that the distractions don’t need to be the same ones.

Instead of different shapes, the researchers tried varying the brightness of the distractions and even using different sounds.

The researchers were surprised to find that it made no difference: people who were distracted at both learning and recall did better than those only distracted at one or the other.

The study only tested motor learning, so we don’t know if the same is true of other types of learning, like visual or linguistic.

Dr. Song is not yet sure how or why the brain responds positively to divided attention in the first place.

She said:

“For now my working hypothesis is that this creates an internal representation in which divided attention is associated with the motor learning process, so it can work as an internal cue.”

If divided attention really can cue memory, then so much the better in this age of endless distractions.

Image credit: Daniela Vladimirova

First study to pinpoint the sole influence of genes on how we learn.

If you have strong reading abilities, then you are also likely to have strong maths abilities.

Whether or not those maths abilities are realised is a different matter which depends on your upbringing and temperament, but the capability is likely there.

Now new research has mapped out the complex set of genes which interact with the environment to crystalise these important reading and math abilities.

Researchers at University College London analysed the genetic code of 12-year-old children in 12,800 British families (Oliver et al., 2014).

This data was compared with their reading comprehension and fluency and mathematical abilities.

The study’s first author, Dr Oliver Davis, explained that the results show…

“…that similar collections of subtle DNA differences are important for reading and maths.

However, it’s also clear just how important our life experience is in making us better at one or the other. It’s this complex interplay of nature and nurture as we grow up that shapes who we are.”

Professor Robert Plomin, who lead the study, said:

“The study does not point to specific genes linked to literacy or numeracy, but rather suggests that genetic influence on complex traits, like learning abilities, and common disorders, like learning disabilities, is caused by many genes of very small effect size.

The study also confirms findings from previous twin studies that genetic differences among children account for most of the differences between children in how easily they learn to read and to do maths.

Children differ genetically in how easy or difficult they find learning, and we need to recognise, and respect, these individual differences.

Finding such strong genetic influence does not mean that there is nothing we can do if a child finds learning difficult — heritability does not imply that anything is set in stone — it just means it may take more effort from parents, schools and teachers to bring the child up to speed.”

Image credit: Rick & Brenda Beerhorst