Few days after listening to Robert Sapolsky's talk, now I got to read this study on the importance of learning new stuff at-least every decade. This is a great wake up call for me (at the dawn of a new decade) especially at an age when complacent starts to sneak in slowly.
I am open to novelty as long as it involves Max which limits my options outside the safety of home zone (no wonder I read neuroscience to keep myself busy for a life time with Max next to me). I try to explain the significance of this to my parents, siblings and friends in vain, since its hard to get through the cognitive bias barrier without sounding preachy and the benefits being anhedonic and very abstract to quantify doesn't help the process either. It's like trying to quantify "morality".
"I remember sitting my folks down and sternly counselling them to make sure they learnt a completely novel skill once per decade, to ensure that their brain doesn’t turn to mush. There is plenty of evidence to support such advice (well, aside from the ‘mush’ bit), but here is a new finding that adds to that evidence, with a whole new level of detail. Xu et al from the Universities of Santa Cruz and Texas, in the USA, did an experiment with one month old mice. They taught the mice a task and then imaged their brains, at the level of individual dendrites. They showed that, within ONE HOUR of the training session, the mice who did well at the task (that is, had learnt it to some extent), had an increase in dendritic spines of about 10%. That is, the brain had undergone structural as well as functional changes. How cool is that?! One training session. What’s more, about 50% of the new spines were still there two weeks later and, for mice training for 16 days, 40% of the new spines were still there three months later. The authors conclude, and as far as I can tell it is a sensible conclusion,
I am open to novelty as long as it involves Max which limits my options outside the safety of home zone (no wonder I read neuroscience to keep myself busy for a life time with Max next to me). I try to explain the significance of this to my parents, siblings and friends in vain, since its hard to get through the cognitive bias barrier without sounding preachy and the benefits being anhedonic and very abstract to quantify doesn't help the process either. It's like trying to quantify "morality".
"I remember sitting my folks down and sternly counselling them to make sure they learnt a completely novel skill once per decade, to ensure that their brain doesn’t turn to mush. There is plenty of evidence to support such advice (well, aside from the ‘mush’ bit), but here is a new finding that adds to that evidence, with a whole new level of detail. Xu et al from the Universities of Santa Cruz and Texas, in the USA, did an experiment with one month old mice. They taught the mice a task and then imaged their brains, at the level of individual dendrites. They showed that, within ONE HOUR of the training session, the mice who did well at the task (that is, had learnt it to some extent), had an increase in dendritic spines of about 10%. That is, the brain had undergone structural as well as functional changes. How cool is that?! One training session. What’s more, about 50% of the new spines were still there two weeks later and, for mice training for 16 days, 40% of the new spines were still there three months later. The authors conclude, and as far as I can tell it is a sensible conclusion,
‘these data indicate that motor learning selectively stabilizes learning-induced new spines and destabilizes pre-existing spines. The prolonged persistence of learning-induced synapses provides a potential cellular mechanism for the consolidation of lasting, presumably permanent, motor memories.’
Finally, they conclude their abstract, which is the bit that is meant to make the reader think this paper truly deserves its place in Nature, with this:
‘Practice of novel, but not previously learned, tasks further promotes dendritic spine formation in adulthood.’ "
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