The following is from Slagter, H. A., Davidson, R. J., & Lutz, A. (2011). Mental training as a tool in the neuroscientific study of brain and cognitive plasticity. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 5. Click here for the full text.
The ability to learn is a function of brain plasticity and essential to the survival of all animals. Humans appear remarkable in this respect, as they can acquire a wide range of skills given appropriate training. Neuroscience research within the last few decades confirms that the human brain is plastic, and much more so than once thought possible.
One of the most salient findings is perhaps the observation that the adult brain can still change significantly in both structure and function as a result of experience. For example, taxi drivers, who obtain extensive navigational experience as adults, have larger posterior hippocampi, a brain structure important for spatial representation of the environment.
Not only long-term expertise, but also relatively short practice has been associated with neural changes in adults. For example, performing a five-finger piano exercise for 2 hours on five consecutive days resulted in an enlargement of primary motor areas representing the finger muscles, which was accompanied by improved performance. Remarkably, this study also showed that mental practice of the same finger exercise resulted in a similar reorganization of the motor cortex to the one observed in the group of participants that physically practiced the movements.
Thus, plasticity appears to be an intrinsic property of the nervous system retained throughout a lifespan and the obligatory consequence of all neural activity, including mental practice. Indeed, it is now commonly held that the brain undergoes continuous changes in response to each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, and awareness itself.
Yet, research also shows that learning is typically highly specific. While individuals trained on a task will improve on that very task, other tasks, even very similar ones, often show little or no improvement. For example, in visual learning tasks, improvements are often not observed if the untrained test stimulus has a different orientation or contrast than the trained stimulus. Similarly, memory training often enhances memory for the trained content, but not memory skills themselves. In the example of the taxi drivers, follow-up research showed that the taxi drivers did not exhibit improved performance on other memory tasks. Thus, training benefits are often stimulus or content specific rather than process specific.
This is obviously a potentially severe impediment for training programs in educational or clinical settings, where the goal is to improve performance in everyday life and which thus necessarily require a general improvement in skills.
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