Science of Learning

How we Learn?

What's going on in the brain when you learn anything, whether it's math, a foreign language, guitar or how to ‘field’ in cricket.

Think about taking a ‘catch’ in cricket. The fielder needs to make an extremely quick assessment of the direction, speed and height of the ball’s flight, and the muscles of the body need to be aligned accordingly. Your brain controls everything by activating specific 'code' for each and every muscle movement. This 'code' is like a series of functions - Neurons working together to achieve a successful catch. If it's your first time doing it, you don't yet have a 'code' for that movement in your brain you need to create it. This 'code' is called Neural Pathway.

What is a Neural Pathway?

Neural Pathways are the connections that form between the neurons in your brain, when you learn a new skill or think about something differently. It is a series of connected neurons that send information from one part of the brain to another through electrochemical signals. A new neural pathway forms when you encounter a piece of information for the first time. For example, experiencing the shape, colour, smell, taste of a new fruit, say dragon fruit will create new pathway. Your brain has now attached meaning to that specific pattern. The more you think about the dragon fruit, the more the pathway is used and the more dominant it becomes.

Learning New Skill

Let us go back to the scenario that a person wants to learn how to take catch in cricket.

The fielder needs to make an extremely quick assessment of the direction, speed and height of the ball’s flight, and the muscles of the body need to be aligned accordingly. The brain controls everything by activating specific neural pathways for each and every muscle movement. 

If it's your first time doing it, you don't yet have a pathway for that movement in your brain and you need to create it. The brain is like a forest full of trees and dense foliage with no clear pathway between point A and point B. As you learn the mechanics of taking the ‘catch’, you create a trail through the forest. Now you can catch a ball flight because you've created that pathway in your brain. With practice, this ‘catch’ pathway in your brain gets strengthened. Ultimately, with more practice, the pathway becomes like a highway making you an expert

Creation of Neural Pathways

The brain is like a forest full of trees and dense foliage with no clear pathway between point A and point B. As you learn the mechanics of taking the ‘catch’, you create a trail through the forest. Now you can catch a ball flight because you've created that pathway in your brain. But you probably don't make many catches because the pathway is so new and isn't very clear yet. In order to improve your ‘catch’ you need to refine and strengthen the ‘catch’ pathway in your brain. The way you do that is through practice. Practice gradually widens the trail through the trees turning it into a dirt road between A and B. With even more practice that dirt road turns into a paved road, allowing information to be transmitted at a faster rate and more catch success.

Eventually with enough practice what started as a trail has become a full-blown highway. Now you're a master fielder catching almost every throw coming your way.

Brain programming

As a computer program acts as logic that determines the flow of functionality, Neural Pathways determine how the Brain will drive our behaviour in certain situation. And this is actually self adjusting program that continually takes the feedback into account and re-programs the Neural Pathway.

What is Neuroplasticity

The brain continually reorganizes itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. This phenomenon known as Neuroplasticity or Brain Plasticity is the brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. It refers to the brain's malleability, which is defined as being "easily influenced, trained, or controlled”. It is the way the brain changes throughout life to adapt, learn and recover. It describes how our experiences can reorganize and develop new neural pathways in the brain.

Neuroplasticity makes your brain resilient. It enables you to recover from stroke, injury, and birth abnormalities.

Neuroplasticity means that brain is always learning. But the brain is neutral – it doesn’t know the difference between good and bad. It learns whatever is repeated – both helpful and unhelpful thoughts, actions and habits. Therefore, neuroplasticity may entrench depressive, anxious, obsessive, and over-reactive patterns.

Research has found that children with blindness have increased connectivity and reorganized neurocircuits when compared with children without this condition. This suggests that the brain adapts to the inability to see by changing its structure and function, providing children with blindness a greater ability to use the information received from the other senses (such as hearing and touch).

Neurogenesis

The brain can generate new neurons through a process called Neurogenesis (it has stem cells in its hippocampus), which is important for learning and spatial memory. New neurons are produced throughout adulthood, but most of them do not survive if not used in some learning – “Use it or throw it”

Further Pointers