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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-12-15
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNHBMFCzznE
so how do we learn and why to some of us learn things more easily than others so as I was mentioned I'm a doctor or avoid come a brain researcher here at the university of British Columbia these of the questions that fascinates me Sabrina research is one of the great frontiers in the understanding of human physiology and also in the consideration of what makes us who
we are it's an amazing time to be a brain researcher and %HESITATION I would argue to you that I have the most interesting job in the world what we know about the breed is changing at a breathtaking pace and much of what we thought we knew and understood about the brain turns out to be not true or incomplete now some of these misconceptions are more obvious
than others for example we used to think that after childhood the breed did not really could not change and it turns out that nothing could be farther from the truth another misconception about the brain is it you only use parts of it at any given time and silent when you do nothing this is also untrue it turns out that even when you're at rest thinking of
nothing your brain is highly active so it's been advances in technology such as MRI was allowed us to make these and many other important discoveries and perhaps the most exciting the most interesting and transformative these discoveries is that every time you learn a new factor skill you change your brain it's something we call neuroplasticity so the littlest twenty five years ago we thought that after about
puberty the only change that took place in the brain were negative the loss of brain cells with aging resulted damaged like a stroke and then studies began to show remarkable rounds of reorganization in the adult brain and he is suing research has shown us that all of our behaviors change our brain that these changes are not limited by age good news rackets and in fact they're
taking place all the time and very importantly Brady organization helps to support recovery after you damage your brain key to each of these changes is neuroplasticity so what does it look like your brain can change in three very basic ways to support learning and the first US chemical it's a great actually functions by transferring chemical signals between brain cells what we call neurons unease trigger series
of actions and reactions so to support learning your brain can increase the amount of the concentrations of these chemicals signaling that's taking place between neurons now because this kind of change can happen very rapidly this support short term memory or the short term improvement in the performance of a motor skill the second way that the brain can change to support learning is by altering its structure
so during learning the brain can change the connections between neurons now here the physical structure of the brain is actually changing so this takes a bit more time these types of changes are related to long term memory for the long term improvement in a motor skill now these prophecies they interact and let me give you an example of how so we've all tried to learn a
new motor skill maybe playing the piano maybe learning to juggle we've had the experience of getting better and better with in a single session of practice and thinking I've got it and then maybe return the next day and almost improvements from the day before their loss what happened well in the short term your brain was able to increase the chemical signaling between your neurons for some
reason those changes did not induce the structural change there are necessary to support long term memory remember that long term memories take time and what you see in the short term does not reflect learning sees physical changes that are now going to support long term memories and chemical changes that support short term memories structural changes also can lead to integrated networks a brain regions that function
together to support learning and they can also lead to certain brain regions of important for very specific behaviors to change your structure to enlarge so here are some examples of that so people who read braille they have larger hand sensory areas in their brain than those of us who don't your dominant hand motor region which is on the left side of your brain if you're right
handed is larger than the other side and research shows that London taxicab drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to get their taxicab license they have larger brain regions devoted to spatial or mapping memories now the last way that your brain can change to support learning is but alternates function as you use a brain region it becomes more and more excitable and easy
to use again and as your brain has these areas and increase their excitability the rain checks how and when they're activated with learning we see the whole networks of brain activity are shifting and changing so neuroplasticity is supported by chemical by structural and by functional changes and these are happening across the whole brain they can occur in isolation from one another but most often they take
place in concert together they support learning and they're taking place all the time I just told you really help awesomely neural plastic your brain as so why can't you learn anything you choose to these what are our kids sometimes fail in school why is weak age do we tend to forget things and why don't people fully recover from brain damage that is what is it that
limits and facilitates neuroplasticity and so this is what I study I studied specifically how it relates to recovery from stroke so recently struck trot for being the third leading cause of death in the United States to be the fourth leading cause of death great news right well actually turns out that the numbers of people having a stroke has not declined we're just better at keeping people
alive after a severe stroke so to be very difficult to help the brain recover from stroke and frankly we have failed to develop effective rehabilitation interventions the net result of this is that stroke is the leading cause of long term disability in adults in the world individuals will show car younger and tending to live longer with that disability and researcher my perfectly shows that the health
related quality of life of Canadians with stroke has declined so clearly we need to be better at helping people recover from stroke and this is an enormous societal problem and it's one that we're not solving so what can be done one thing is absolutely clear the best driver of neural plastic change in your brain is your behavior problem is that the dose of behavior the dose
of practice that's required to learn new and relearn old motor skills it's very large and now effectively deliver these large doses of practice is a very difficult problem it's also very expensive problem so the approach that my research is taken is to develop therapies that prime or that prepared the brain to learn and these have included brain stimulation exercise and robotics but through my research I
realize that a major limitation to the development of therapies that speed recovery from stroke is that patterns of neural plasticity are highly variable from person person now as a researcher variability used to drive me crazy it makes it very difficult to use statistics to test your data and your ideas because of this medical intervention studies are specifically designed to minimize variability but in my research it's
becoming really clear but the most important the most informative data that we collect is showing this variability so by studying the brain after stroke we've learned a lot and I think these lessons are very valuable in other areas so the first lesson is that the primary driver of change in your brain is your behavior so there's no neuroplasticity drug you can take nothing is more effective
than practice helping you learn and the bottom line is you have to do the work in fact my research has shown that increased difficulty increased struggle if you will during practice action leads to both more learning and greater structural change in the brain problem here is is that no plasticity can work both ways it can be positive you learn something new and you refined motor skill
it also can be negative though you forgot something you once knew you become addicted to drugs maybe you have chronic pain so your brain is tremendously plastic and it's being shaped both structurally and functionally but everything you do but also by everything that you don't do the second lesson we've learned about the brain is that there is no one size fits all approach to learning so
there's no recipe for learning Nick consider the popular belief that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to learn and to master a new motor skill now I can assure you is not quite that simple for some of us it's going to take a lot more practice and for others it may take far less so the shaping of our plastic brains is it's far too unique
for there to be any single intervention that's going to work for all of us and now this realization have forced us to consider something called personalize medicine so the idea that to optimize outcomes each individual requires their own intervention and the idea actually comes from cancer treatments and here it turns out that genetics are very important and matching certain types of chemotherapy was Pacific forms of
cancer my research is showing that this also applies to recovery from stroke so there are certain characteristics of rain structure and function that we call biomarkers and these biomarkers are proving to be very helpful in helping us to match Pacific therapies with individual patients and the data from my love suggests it's a combination of biomarkers that best predicts no plastic change and patterns of recovery after
stroke and that's not surprising given how complicated the human brain is but I also think we can consider this concept much more broadly given the unique structure and function of each of our brains what we've learned about neural plasticity after stroke applies to everyone behaviors that you employ in your everyday life for important each of them is changing your brain and I believe we have to
consider not just personalized medicine but personalized learning the uniqueness of your brain will affect you both as a learner and also as a teacher and now this idea helps us to understand why some children can thrive in traditional education settings and another stone where some of us can learn languages easily and yet others can pick up any sport and excel so when you leave this room
today your brain will not be the same as when you entered this morning and I think that's pretty amazing but each of you is going to change your brain differently understanding these differences these individual patterns this variability and change it's going to enable the next great advance in neuroscience it's going to allow us to develop new and more effective interventions and allow for matches between learners
and teachers and patients have interventions and this does not just apply to recovery from stroke it place to each of us as a parent as a teacher as a manager and also because you're a telex today a lifelong learner study how and what you learn best Pete those behaviors that are healthy for your brain and break those behaviors and habits that are not practice learning about
doing the work that your brain requires so the best strategies are going to vary between individuals you what they're even going to vary within individuals so for you learning music may come very easily but learning to snowboard much harder I hope that you leave today with a new appreciation of how magnificent your greatness you enter plastic brain are constantly being shaped by the world around you
