Cognitive training designed to focus on what’s important while ignoring distractions can enhance the brain’s information processing, enabling the ability to “learn to learn,” finds a new study on mice.
“As any educator knows, merely recollecting the information we learn in school is hardly the point of an education,” says André Fenton, a professor of neural science at New York University and the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature. “Rather than using our brains to merely store information to recall later, with the right mental training, we can also ‘learn to learn,’ which makes us more adaptive, mindful, and intelligent.”
Researchers have frequently studied the machinations of memory–specifically, how neurons store the information gained from experience so that the same information can be recalled later. However, less is known about…
