Science

Brain Learning Human vs Animals

Research uncovers how the brain processes learning by identifying the exact moment an animal learns a new skill. By observing brain, neurons in mice, scientists found that learning occurs much faster than previously thought, in as few as 20 to 40 tries.

muhammad-imran-ali 2 min read · 1 year ago

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brain learning

“Looking at a tiny part of the brain in a mouse, we can understand how the brain learns, and we can makes predictions about how the human brain might work,” said Kishore Kuchibhotla, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals.

“The field of neuroscience has made great progress decoding motor activity and how the brain processes sight and sound. But a holy grail of this type of research is thought—what comes between the hearing and the doing—we’re all still trying to understand the patterns of brain activity that underly higher-order cognitive processes. These findings are a step in that direction.”

Although the ability to learn quickly would benefit any animal in the wild, animals studied in labs seem to learn slowly and methodically. It typically takes mice, for instance, thousands of tries to learn a task, several hundred at best.

Kuchibhotla’s lab previously found that animals’ performance doesn’t necessarily sync with their knowledge—or that animals might know a lot more than they demonstrate in tests. The lab also found that animals that seem to be slow learners might be testing their new knowledge. But by merely watching animals struggle at tasks, they couldn’t tell a slow learner from a strategic tester of boundaries.

“We are interested in the idea that humans and other animals may know things about the world, things that they choose not to show,” Kuchibhotla said. “Our core question is what is the neural basis of this distinction between learning and performance.”