Brain, Learning and Neuroscience: Test Your Knowledge!

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Neuroscience has confirmed two major distinctions between adult and child brains that affect how we learn throughout life.

First, neuronal connections are not well established in children, whereas they are in adults. Neurons analyze, transmit and store information in memory while structuring the appropriate response. We can therefore say that adults are more efficient, but since their habits are well established, the mistakes they make are more difficult to correct.

Secondly, the prefrontal cortex, which is the hub of several cognitive functions, including language, reasoning and working memory, is one of the last brain regions to reach maturity. As a result, adults have better control over their learning than children and adolescents.

Read more: Education through the lens of neuroscience

A) 25 minutes. This is the amount of time it takes for the brain to re-focus on a task following a distraction. However, the typical worker has only 11 minutes to do this.

B) 0.25 seconds. This is the minimum amount of time required for the brain to switch from one task to another.

C) 3 to 4 times per second. It is at this frantic rate that the perception-action loop that is the basis of the functioning of our nervous system occurs. We are therefore talking about 3 to 4 decisions made by the brain per second… At this rate, most of these decision processes are synonymous with reflexes.

D) 5 to 10 minutes. To maximize our attention in a task, cognitive neuroscientist and attention specialist Jean-Philippe Lachaux suggests that we set ourselves micro-objectives of 5 to 10 minutes each.

Read more: Attention, in numbers

A.

No, the baby’s brain is not devoid of knowledge… As proof, babies already have a sense of numbers: they can intuitively evaluate quantities, for example by knowing the difference between 2 objects or a dozen. During their first year, children already recognize all the phonemes of their mother tongue.

In short, the little human beings have an excellent “learning algorithm”, which means that by the age of 3, they can associate symbols – especially numbers – with objects and thus begin to do mathematics. As for the language circuits, they are set up as early as 2 months and are well established by the age of 5.

Read more:

• 7 myths about learning, debunked by neuroscience
• 8 Types of Memory… to Remember!

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Neuroscientists do not fully agree on this question, but we are beginning to get some insight. One thing is certain: the number of tasks we can do effectively is quite small and the more the brain is involved, the greater the risk of errors (Skaugset et al., 2016). After observing, by neuroimaging, the brain activity of some thirty volunteer participants engaged in multitasking, Inserm researchers Sylvain Charron and Étienne Koechlin (2010) concluded that the brain was not able to efficiently perform more than two tasks at a time. For neuroscientist Scott Huettel of Duke University, however, it is conceivable that more than two tasks could be processed simultaneously, but this would depend on the nature of the tasks.

Read more: Are we really good at multitasking?

The complete, correct statements are as follows:

Using a type of MRI called “Diffusion MRI”, Denis Le Bihan developed in the years 1990-2000 an image analysis program to map the connectivity of the brain. This method has the particularity of calculating the micro-movements of water molecules present in the brain’s nerve fibres, the diffusion of water being slower when it is perpendicular to the direction of the nerve fibres.

Remember that these nerve fibres, also called axons, form the white matter of the brain that connects different areas of grey matter and that the brain is nearly 80% water! Le Bihan’s image analysis program reconstructs the path of axons in three dimensions from the images it makes of them in several directions. At present, this is the only existing means of visualizing the spatial arrangement of brain nerve fibres and all the connections between the different regions of the human brain.

This type of MRI has been used in a recent study that revealed that, contrary to what was thought, new learning can leave its mark on the cortex very quickly, in as little as an hour.

Read more: Learning and Forgetting: New Perspectives on the Brain