I like learning.
One of the things that I love so much about YouTube
is that it gives me the ability to experiment
and to learn new things.
So today, in collaboration with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany,
I'm going to be learning to draw--
or trying to-- and talking a bit about what
happens in our brains when we learn new things.
This should be interesting.
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One of the curiosity metrics in Merck KGaA's 2018 Curiosity
Report is joyous exploration, defined
as the pleasure of seeking out new information
and engaging in novel experiences
and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.
I really connected to that sentiment
and so set out to start learning to draw,
a skill that I really admire in other people
and have wanted to be better at for pretty much my whole life.
Now, most of my drawings look like that of a toddler.
And so I don't expect to become an expert
in just a couple of weeks.
This is the beginning of what will hopefully
be a much longer journey.
But I did want to dig into some of the science surrounding what
happens in our brains when we learn new skills in the hope
that maybe I could will a little bit of that to happen
in my own brain.
You know how when you first start learning to do something,
that's really hard and takes a lot of concentration,
but then once you do it over and over,
it just sort of becomes something
you do without thinking?
Well, I wondered if this was actually
something happening at a level we could observe in our brains.
I found a 2013 meta-analysis that
looked at lots of different studies
that used neuroimaging to investigate which
parts of the brains showed activity while learning
a task in healthy young adults.
Some of these tasks were cognitive thinking tasks,
while others were physical motor skills.
They found that as participants underwent training
for a specific task, the studies observed a decrease in activity
in brain regions including the frontoparietal control
network and the dorsal attention network
and an increase in activity in regions like the default
network, which the authors state is typically suppressed
during highly demanding tasks.
The study also noted that high levels of activity
in these default network regions had
been associated with greater task ease and mind wandering.
These increases in activity in the default
network after training feel like they make some intuitive sense
to me.
Imagine a little kid learning to tie their shoes.
They need to use all of their concentration
to get it just right.
But after years of doing this almost every day,
I've gotten pretty good at tying my own shoes,
and I don't have to concentrate on it very much anymore.
And my brain is free to do other things.
The authors hypothesize that the combination
of increased default network activity and decreased
frontoparietal control network activity
could be a good indicator of training-related performance
gains.
And while this is interesting in a scenario
like me learning a new skill, it could
be a really important metric in areas like neurorehabilitation,
which strives to help patients to recover
from neurological injuries.
Having indicators of when rehabilitation and training
interventions are or are not working
could be helpful for evaluating treatment efficacy.
So this was a cool look at one of the many things
that happened at a big brain level during learning.
But I also wanted to take a look at what
happens when we zoom in to the cellular level in the brain.
This is why I draw my animations in Illustrator.
Myelin is a fatty insulator that wraps around neuronal axons,
hoping to speed up the transmission
of electrical signals along their lengths.
Myelin is formed by cells called oligodendrocytes.
And some research has found that learning a new motor skill
can increase the proliferation of these cells in mice.
Researchers took mice and gave them a new problem to tackle,
a wheel with irregularly spaced rungs.
They found that as mice learned new running strategies
to conquer this complex wheel, they
saw an increase in both oligodendrocytes
and their precursor cells in the mouse brains.
They also found that if they interfered
with oligodendrocyte production in these mice,
the mice had a harder time developing the skills needed
to run on the complex wheel.
So mice that had a reduced ability
to form these new myelin-producing cells also
had a reduced ability to learn this new motor
skill, indicating that oligodendrocytes and myelin
might be very important in the motor skill learning process.
The authors hypothesized that this
might be because new connections are formed
or existing connections are strengthened
between neurons in the brain when
the mice learn this new motor skill
as the neurons involved in that motion fire
over and over again.
The increased activity in those connections
might stimulate myelination of the involved cells,
thereby making the circuit more efficient.
So am I creating new myelin in my brain
and switching to the default network as I draw?
Probably not yet based on the looks of what's
here in my sketchbook.
But if I remain diligent and I keep up practicing
and I learn the motor skills needed to control the pen
to draw straight lines and shapely circles, then
maybe I will.
So thank you to Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
for sponsoring this video.
Joyous exploration is just one of the metrics measured
in their new 2018 Curiosity Report.
Their curiosity index also focuses on openness
to other people's ideas, deprivation sensitivity,
and stress tolerance, which I talked
about in a recent video, which you can watch
by clicking on the card above.
You can also click on the links in the description
below to explore the 2018 Curiosity Report.
And as always, remember to go forth and do science.
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