In his life, a human being never stops learning new things. While it helps with growing and adapting to new situations, a new study also suggests that learning mechanisms shape how the brain stores memories.
Over the centuries, human beings have managed to survive but also to prosper thanks to their ability to learn and adapt to new situations. There are two ways to learn. First there is experiential learning, when we learn things by accident, because we face them, or because we are in a new environment in which we learn to navigate. Then there is reinforcement learning. It is when we deliberately decide to learn things, like a new language for example. British researchers have just published a study in the journal NatureCommunicationsin which they explain that these different learning mechanisms are linked to different parts of memory stored in the brain.
The things we learn are not stored in the same place
The science team says we store information differently depending on how we learned it. For this same reason, it may also be more or less easy for us to lose or change this information. Twenty-six people took part in this study, aged between 19 and 35. They agreed to take part in MRI examinations. The researchers found that the different modes of learning activated different neural pathways in the brain. “This research shows that we have multiple networks in the brain that help us store learned knowledge, which means that damage to one part of the brain will always leave alternative mechanisms available for learning,” says Miriam Klein-Flügge , lead author of the study.
Information learned voluntarily remains in memory
In addition, researchers have found that information acquired through reinforcement is retained longer in memory. “We also learned that some of this knowledge is very persistent and the brain doesn’t forget it, even when it becomes useless. Whereas knowledge acquired through an alternative learning mechanism is more flexible and can more easily be modified and transformed into new knowledge”, continues Miriam Klein-Flügge. When it comes to unlearning or forgetting information, it is easier to do so with information acquired by experience, by accident. “It’s common knowledge that it’s good for our brains to keep learning new things throughout our lives. This is why it can be beneficial to understand the different ways in which we learn and store knowledge, in order to know which method suits us best”, concludes the scientist.
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