Teaching and the Brain

Another fascinating post over at Shrink Rap explores how learning sculpts the brains connections.

“Recent studies have shown that in the absence of any overt behavior, and even during sleep or anesthesia, the brain’s spontaneous activity is not random, but organized in patterns of correlated activity that occur in anatomically and functionally connected regions,” says senior author Maurizio Corbetta, M.D., Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology. “The reasons behind the spontaneous activity patterns remain mysterious, but we have now shown that learning causes small changes in those patterns, and that these changes are behaviorally important.” See the entire post at Shrink Rap.