The University of Coimbra (UC) participated in a study that revealed fundamental information about how the brain learns from experiences and anticipates potential future events, the higher education institution reported this Friday.
“The research team studied the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex – regions of the brain crucial for memory and learning – in people undergoing clinical procedures,” stated the UC, in a note sent to the Lusa agency.
The first author of the study and researcher at the Center for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT) of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS) of the UC, Pawel Tacikowski, cited in the note, stated that “the ability to recognize patterns and anticipating possible future events is an essential part of human learning.”
According to UC, previous studies used neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study how these processes occur in the brain.
“However, this type of method does not allow direct observation of neuronal activity.”
In this study, recently published in the journal Nature, the researchers were able to record the neuronal activity of individual cells in real time, allowing new understanding of brain coding processes.
Participants in the study viewed a series of images in a specific sequence, without being told to memorize or predict anything.
“Surprisingly, neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex gradually adjusted their activity to reflect the underlying pattern, demonstrating that the brain was able to implicitly learn the structure of the sequence and construct a mental map of ‘when’ and ‘what.’ ‘if I would continue’. ”, stated the UC.
The researchers also observed that the neurons activated the same pattern spontaneously: This repetition activity is believed to be the brain’s way of consolidating learning..
The results obtained allow us to better understand how the brain encodes and memorizes the sequence of experiences, combining information about “what” happens and “when”, allowing us to anticipate future behaviors.
In addition to first author Pawel Tacikowski, co-authors of the study are researchers Gu¨ldamla Kalender, Davide Ciliberti and Itzhak Fried.
The research took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (Department of Neurosurgery), the Karolinska Institute (Department of Neurosciences), and UC.
Source: Observadora
