Balancing old and new skills
To learn new motor skills, the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons, forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task. However, if the brain were too plastic, previously learned skills would be lost too easily.A new computational model developed by MIT neuroscientists explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability, and how it can learn very similar tasks without interference between them.The key, the researchers say, is that neurons are constantly changing their connections with other neurons. However, not all of the changes are functionally relevant — they simply allow the brain to explore many possible ways to execute a certain skill, such as a new tennis stroke.“Your brain is always trying to find the configurations that balance everything so you can do two tasks, or three tasks, or however many you’re learning,” says Robert Ajemian, a research scientist...