By PsyBlog, November 24, 2015
This post has been viewed 2,275 times.
Learning a new route causes the brain to change its structure, a new study finds.
Brief navigational training is enough to change the hippocampus and how it is linked to other areas.
This is one of the first studies to suggest that learning really does cause changes to the brain’s structure.
Dr Tim Keller, the study’s first author, said:
“The hippocampus has long been known to be involved in spatial learning, but only recently has it been possible to measure changes in human brain tissues as synapses become modified during learning.
Our findings provide a better understanding of what causes the hippocampal changes and how they are related to communication across a network of areas involved in learning and representing cognitive maps of the world around us.”
