News Finding: For example, a trained pianist can learn a new melody easier than learning how to hit a tennis serve.
Paper Finding: These results support our hypothesis that the structure of a network determines which patterns of neural activity (and corresponding behaviours) a subject can readily learn to generate.
News Context: For example, a trained pianist can learn a new melody easier than learning how to hit a tennis serve. 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.
Paper Context: 2) , indicating that it was difficult to learn to generate new co-modulation patterns, even when those patterns would have led to improved performance in the task. These results support our hypothesis that the structure of a network determines which patterns of neural activity (and corresponding behaviours) a subject can readily learn to generate. Two additional lines of evidence show that BCI control was more learnable when using within-manifold perturbations than outside-manifold perturbations.