A recent study led by a group of neuroscientists from Brown University describes the brain processes that enable children learn faster than adults.
The speed and ease with which children can learn vast amounts of new information makes them exceptional. According to a recent study, GABA is the secret to this brain function that allows people to comprehend ABCs and 123s quickly.
" GABA" a secret
GABA stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter. Researchers describe GABA's critical function in aiding children in processing new knowledge and laying the groundwork for their brains to learn and store much more in the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology.
Takeo Watanabe, a professor of cognitive and language sciences at Brown University and the study's principal author, said,
"What we found is a rapid increase in GABA in youngsters, connected with learning."
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It's a groundbreaking discovery, according to Watanabe, and it's also unexpected. There hasn't been any conclusive neuroscientific data to date that explains why youngsters learn more quickly than adults. That the adult brain need a period of rest after learning new knowledge has been recognized for at least a century.
The brain network involved in how adults process information is still fluid, or "hot," Watanabe explained, shortly after learning something new. The information that was only recently digested can be erased, or in other words, overruled, if the same or a comparable neural network is required to learn something else too quickly. Retrograde interference is the term used to describe this widely recognized phenomena, he said.
According to Watanabe, the neurotransmitter GABA is crucial in aiding the brain's ability to integrate new information. It "stabilizes" the network to prevent further learning from overriding prior information and protects knowledge from backward interference. However, he noted that children do not yet possess completely developed GABA inhibitory processing. Children's lower GABA levels explain why they have less inhibition and less impulse control than adults.
Then how are kids able to "learn and learn and learn and learn," as Watanabe puts it, "if GABA is necessary to set the brain up to learn successive objects and children have less GABA than adults"?
In earlier research, children's GABA concentration was only ever assessed once, in a setting unrelated to learning. The researchers realized they needed to look at how GABA concentration varies in relation to distinct learning phases in order to comprehend how learning processes work.
Watanabe and Sebastian Frank, a former post-doctoral researcher in Watanabe's lab and current director of an independent research team at the University of Regensburg in Germany, used a different strategy for the study.
Before, during, and after learning sessions, they evaluated the GABA concentration in early visual cortex regions using a cutting-edge imaging technique known as functional MRS. The concentrations of youngsters (aged 8 to 11) and adults were then compared (ages 18 to 35).
They discovered that children do indeed have less GABA overall than adults do before learning even starts, according to Watanabe. However, the researchers discovered that whereas the concentration of GABA in adults did not change, it quickly increased in youngsters during the second round of learning.
Following learning sessions appeared to raise GABA levels in kids, which helped the newly acquired knowledge to quickly stabilize, according to Frank.
In follow-up behavioral studies, the researchers discovered that children's resilience to retrograde interference and consequent stabilization did, in fact, take place minutes after the sessions concluded. The results of the experiments suggest that children exhibit more dynamic GABA-associated inhibitory processing than adults, which more quickly adapts to stabilize learning than in adults. Adults, on the other hand, remained in what the researchers called a more fragile state of learning for at least an hour after the session.
Learning becomes more efficient in children than in adults thanks to this quick stabilization in youngsters, which allows them to learn more in a given amount of time, according to Frank.
Despite the tests' primary focus on visual learning, Watanabe claimed that the results applied to various learning processes including memory. The fact that the discoveries concerning children's learning could be applied to adult learning, he added, is equally interesting. For instance, a novel technique or therapy might be created to boost the levels of GABA in adult brains, according to Watanabe.
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