The same brain that we originally used for basic survival tasks like hunting and gathering food, 200,000 years later we use it to learn abstract concepts like energy or gravity. But how is the brain capable of acquiring these kinds of scientific concepts?
New research from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania has discovered how the brain can learn new kinds of ideas . Scientists Robert Mason and Marcel Just used neural decoding techniques developed at the university itself to identify in a group of 9 advanced physics and engineering students the specific physics concepts that they asked to remember at a certain point in time. While the participants viewed 30 familiar concepts such as gravity, entropy or refraction on a computer, a program materialized the concept on a screen by each university student’s own brain pattern.
A pattern of learning
The patterns of brain activation at the time they had to think about physics concepts indicated that all the brains of the college students used the brain systems in the same way: the brain patterns revealed how new knowledge was formed through reuse of existing neural systems. The regions that seemed to be activated when these concepts were exposed were regions that already had another role; that is, neurons were “reprogrammed” to learn physics. We can say that learning science changes neurons.
“ If science teachers know how the brain encodes a new concept of science, then they can define and elaborate that concept in a way that matches the encoding. They can teach the brain by using the brain’s own language , ”says study co-author Mason.
The research showed for the first time how learning physics concepts takes place by reusing neural structures that are originally used for ordinary everyday purposes such as causality, algebraic representation, periodicity or energy flow. (For example: the brain systems that process the rhythmic periodicity of a horse’s gallop also aid in understanding the concepts of waves in physics.)
“This is why human beings have been able to advance and innovate, since we can use our brain for new purposes. Human brains have not changed much in a few thousand years , but new fields such as aeronautics, genetics, medicine and computer science have developed them and forced them to be constantly changing . Our results explain how the brain is capable of learning and discovering new types of concepts ”, concludes Just, co-author of the work.
The study has been published in the journal Psychological Science .
