News Finding: Understanding how the brain's activity can be "flexed" during learning could eventually be used to develop better treatments for stroke and other brain injuries.
Paper Finding: We saw consistent differences in learnability.
News Context: As reported in Nature, the researchers found for the first time that there are limitations on how adaptable the brain is during learning and that these restrictions are a key determinant for whether a new skill will be easy or difficult to learn. Understanding how the brain's activity can be "flexed" during learning could eventually be used to develop better treatments for stroke and other brain injuries. "We found that the brain works in a similar way during learning.
Paper Context: Having a single value for each session allowed us to more easily compare learning across sessions and to relate the amount of learning to a variety of properties of each perturbation (Extended Data Fig. We saw consistent differences in learnability. Thus, our results do not rely on the precise form of our learning metric, but the form we used provides a scalar value as a convenient summary metric.