A mere two hours of "child-like" learning could be enough to stimulate adult brain growth -- much quicker than previously thought -- according to a study by the University of Hong Kong.
Nineteen adult volunteers (all students from the University of Beijing) were shown different coloured cards, each given a new, entirely made-up name. They were asked to memorise the new names for the colours and told that they would be tested on these at a later date. This sort of learning is similar to the way that young children grow to understand their environment.
After three days of conditioning in this way (in five sessions which took place across three days, taking around two hours in total), the participants were given MRI scans. The scans revealed that new grey matter had formed in the left hemisphere of all of their brains. Whether the new matter was comprised of new neurons or just the branches tat they grow on (dendrites) is yet to be determined.
Previous studies had shown that new brain growth is possible over longer time periods, but not over such a short space of time.
The key to the brain growth appears to be the change in perception, because the colours were given new names and the subjects learnt to associate those new names with the colours -- as opposed to them simply learning a list of names, for example. This is supported by the fact that the areas of the brain responsible for processing colour, vision and perceptions were the ones that grew.
The findings -- which have been published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences -- were a surprising result from a study that originally set out to find out whether people come to perceive the world in different ways depending on the language they speak.
Researcher Veronica Kwok writes: "This pattern of findings demonstrates that the anatomical structure of the adult human brain can change very quickly, specifically during the acquisition of new, named categories."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
