Learning and the Brain

The Neuropsychology of Learning

Have you ever heard the term neuroplasticity? Once virtually unheard of, the idea of neuroplasticity is increasingly making its way into the popular media, as research reveals the importance of understanding the concept for many other areas of life.

Norman Doidge (2007), best-selling author on the topic, defines neuroplasticity as “the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience.” It is, simply put, the ability of the brain to physically rewire itself, based on what we do with it. This may sound simple, but it’s actually revolutionary in the field of brain science! For a very long time, scientists believed that by the time we became adults our brains had stopped growing, and our abilities and capacities could not get any better. The idea of neuroplasticity first emerged in the 1800s, but never gained ground as a popular theory until near the end of the 20th century when more advanced neurological research techniques, combined with some ground-breaking research, brought it into the scientific mainstream.

The implications of neuroplasticity are widespread. First of all, if the brain can rewire itself, even in adulthood, this means that adults’ capacity for learning and gaining new skills and capacities is greater than we believed for a very long time. Learning has been shown to physically reorganise the brain. This means that we can grow and change neural networks in the brain which are responsible for controlling our ability to do many things and how well we can do those things. We can create bigger, faster neural networks that increase what we can do and how well we can do it, at any stage of life (Doidge, 2007). This includes learning – the more we learn, the better we get at learning. This means that by practising things, and doing so in the right way, we can actually get smarter!

It’s likely that you’ve heard of the concept of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) scores. These are intended to provide some indication of people’s relative intellectual abilities – basically how smart we are – in a way that allows for comparison. A person with an IQ of 100 is not as smart as someone with an IQ of 120, for example, in terms of the theory underlying IQ. This theory is recognised as flawed in a number of ways (for example, it’s fundamentally unreliable and sociologically biased (Jenson, 1980; Martschenko, 2018)), but it’s still in use because there is no better alternative. It’s predicated on the idea that our “quotient” of intelligence is fixed, and does not change. Neuroplasticity implies that anyone can change their intellectual ability, become smarter, increase their “quotient” of intelligence, just by using their brain enough in the right ways. Think of the implications of this, for example, children who do badly at school, or adults stuck in unfulfilling low-end jobs because they didn’t achieve academically in the past. Understanding neuroplasticity opens up a world of possibilities!

What has been even more interesting to discover, is that brain plasticity applies not only to healthy brains, but to damaged brains as well. People who have suffered brain damage due to a stroke or an accident and lost a particular capability, such as speech, were previously thought to have no hope of recovering that capability. Science has identified certain brain areas as controlling certain abilities and capacities, and the belief was that if a certain area was damaged, the capacities and abilities it controlled were lost. Neuroplasticity research and neuroplasticity-based rehabilitation therapies have shown (Doidge, 2007) that this is not the case. Other areas of the brain can take over the capabilities that damaged areas once controlled, and people with damaged brains can often relearn skills they had lost. This discovery is supported by MRI evidence showing activity in the brain when someone uses a particular capability such as moving their hand, in areas other than the traditional brain areas known for controlling hand movement or whatever the capability may be. MRI evidence also supports the physical growth and reorganisation of neural networks in the brain in response to practice.

So, what does all this mean? Well, it means that cognitive capabilities, your ability to think and learn, which most people think is fixed (unchangeable), is actually not. Talent is not randomly assigned at birth and unchanging. If you’re bad at something, and think you just lack the aptitude or are not cut out to do it, the radical truth is that you have the capacity to change that, and that you have quite a lot of control over your brain’s capacity to learn to do things. This applies to everything from playing chess to speaking a language, from doing calculus to doing gymnastics. You may have heard of the “10 000 hours rule”, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book, “Outliers: The Story of Success". In this book, Gladwell claims that if you put in 10 000 hours of practice on a particular skill, such as for example golf, you can gain mastery, the level of proficiency of a professional player. This claim has been debunked to some extent for various reasons (one of them is how you spend those hours, and we’ll look at that more in a minute). However, there is a core of truth to the claim that can be proven with neuroplastic research – the more time you spend practising something, and practising the right way, the more your brain will grow the neural capacity to do that thing and do it well. In their book, “Peak: How all of us can achieve extraordinary things”, authors Erikson and Pool consider the phenomenon of prodigies in a broad variety of fields (2016). They conclude that prodigies are created, sculpted by what the relevant people do – how they learn, and learn about their learning, and apply that to how they practise, and then repeat that cycle. This aligns with some of the findings from Gladwell’s work, and is supported by a large corpus of neuroplasticity research. Coyle (2009) also writes about talent, looking at talent hotbeds internationally for skills like football/soccer and tennis, and concludes that it is how learning and practice are taking place in these areas that leads to a large number of top players emerging, rather than anything intrinsic to the biology or sociology of the people in the talent hotbed areas.

The Biology of Neuroplasticity

What’s actually happening in the brain? What does neuroplasticity really mean? Let’s zoom in and have a look. When you do something, such as serving a tennis ball, your brain guides your body in making certain movements. Associated with those movements, what is happening in your brain is that specific neurons “fire”, meaning that communication takes place between neurons by means of electrical impulses and neurotransmitters. The same action will also be associated with the same firing pattern, linking together the neurons involved into a firing pattern in a manner that is described in neuropsychology with the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together”. If your tennis coach helps you to adjust your grip for your serve, you will have very subtly changed the muscle use and position and motion of the serving action, and the neural pattern of firing – the specific neurons involved and how the neural impulses travel through this network - will subtly adjust to reflect this. To understand why this matters, you need to know a little bit of biology.

Diagram of a neuron showing the myelin sheath in yellow

Our nerves are surrounded by an insulating layer, sometimes called a sheath. This sheath, composed of a combination of protein and fatty substances called myelin, is present for all the nerves in our body, including those in our brains and spinal cords. Imagine finding a rarely used metal slide in a children’s play park. It’s covered in dirt that has gathered on the surface. You climb the ladder and slide down, but you find you don’t go very fast. You try again and have a similar experience. What happens, however, if you go down the slide 10 times? Your clothing starts to wipe the dust off a little, and your speed increases slightly. If you go down the slide 50 times, your travel along the metal surface slowly polishes it and you begin to zoom down. The same sort of thing happens to your neural pathways if you fire neural impulses along them many times. The myelin sheath is what allows electrical impulses to be transmitted quickly and efficiently along the nerve cells. The more often you trigger a certain neural circuit, the thicker the myelin sheath for that pattern of neurons becomes, and the faster it is possible to send the neural impulse along that circuit.

Practising anything enough, in the right way, has a physical effect on the brain, thickening the relevant myelin sheaths, in the same way that enough practice lifting weights the right way will help you gain bigger and stronger muscles. With stronger muscles you can lift/push/pull heavier weights. With more myelinated neural pathways, whatever capabilities those neural pathways enable get better, stronger, and more polished. This applies as much to your serve in tennis as it does to your ability to do maths or program in Python, and what’s exciting about it is that it means you are entirely in control of your ability to learn how to do something! Not only that, but research indicates that when activities use similar neural pathways, one activity can benefit from the myelination of the neural paths caused by practice of the other activity: for example, solving logic puzzles or maths problems can prime you to find it easier to learn something like programming.

The Principles of Neuroplasticity

Most people have had the experience of trying to learn something and deciding that they were bad at it. Sometimes they even tried really hard, and practised a lot. If what neuroplasticity tells us about learning and the brain is true, why didn’t this help them gain proficiency? The answer lies in exactly how they were going about trying to learn, the manner in which they practised, how much they practised, and how long they persisted in practising. Authors Kleim and Jones considered this question and identified certain principles of neuroplasticity that help us to understand in more detail what neuroplasticity means for our brains, so that we can leverage these principles to improve our learning (Doidge, 2007).

Use It or Lose It

You will tend to find, if you look into people’s backgrounds, that the student for whom analysing poetry or coding comes particularly easily will have some background experience in those or similar activities that give them a head start. However, that head start is not impossible for you to catch up; you could become more proficient than those who far outstripped you initially at a particular skill or activity if you practise that skill and they don’t, or even if you just practise more and “better” (more on this later) than them. Why is this? Surely they’ve built thickly myelinated neural networks already?

Here is where the flipside of neuroplasticity comes into play. The phrase used to exemplify this principle in neuropsychology is “use it or lose it!”. This means that even if you build a fantastic, connected, fast neural network for a particular skill or activity, if you stop using that network, its effectiveness will diminish. Why does this happen? What is happening in the brain? To explore this, we’ll consider a fascinating study reported by Doidge (2007). In this study, researchers looked at neural activity in the brains of people who lost their eyesight. When they could still see, they had strong, active neural networks for processing incoming visual information. Directly after they lost their sight, these networks remained intact. However, when their brain activity was looked at again after a few years, the region that used to activate when they looked at something back when they had sight, was shown to have started activating when other senses such as hearing were used. The brain was able to identify that the neural “real estate” for sight was unused, and allowed the neighbouring brain regions to capture that “real estate” and use it to grow their neural networks. Have you ever heard of someone who lost their sight or hearing but developed another exceptionally sensitive sense that helped them compensate for the loss? When that happens, it is because of what we have just described as happening in the brain.

Specificity

Exactly what you’re practising will determine which neural networks in your brain are grown and improved.

Imagine that you’re trying to learn to code, and you decide to spend a lot of time reading and rereading through your course notes. When you come to solving complex logical problems however, you still have difficulty. You start to work on a group project with a friend, and your friend observes that you tend to get mired in the detail of the code syntax (the way the coding instructions are structured and arranged in a computer language ) when you start coding a solution, and lose the bigger picture. She suggests you practise mapping out your solution in pseudocode (a spoken-language-based notation resembling a simplified programming language) first, as well as practising brain teasers to strengthen your problem solving and executive function skills.

Once you start practising things that specifically relate to where your problems lie, you find that you start to slowly gain proficiency at coding longer and more difficult solutions.

Repetition

As you’ve already learned, it is the transmission of neural impulses through neural networks that leads to myelination of those networks. You need to fire neural impulses through those networks many times to achieve any significant change in myelinisation, or to prompt the neural network to grow new neurons to increase its capacity.

To achieve this, you need to repeat whatever you were doing that resulted in activating those neural networks in the first place – in other words, practise, practise, practise.

Intensity

It’s not just repetition that matters but having the right amount of focus and focussing on the right things. We’ll look more at this when we get to specific, actionable tips for activating neuroplasticity in your learning, later on.

Time

Growing new neurons, and myelinating existing neural networks, happen at different points during practice. You have to practise for a long enough period of time for both of these to happen to enough of an extent to really make a difference (it’s not 10 000 hours as Gladwell claimed, but if you think of the “10 000 hour” rule as an analogy for “practise a lot”, you’ve got the basic idea! Also remember that the “10 000 hour” rule was suggested for attaining complete mastery of something; if your goal is to play tennis somewhat better at your local club on the weekend, you will obviously need to put in less time practising than someone who wants to win a Grand Slam!).

Salience

The relevance of what and how you’re practising to what you want to achieve is important. Practising swimming is not going to help you to learn to speed read, any more than practising singing will help you to run faster.

Age

Although neuroplasticity research shows that neural growth can still happen in the adult brain, and that your talents and abilities are not set in stone as an adult, it is also true that children’s brains are more plastic, more malleable than adults. Children also need less repetition to learn (think of the poor parent who complains “I only said that swear word once in front of my toddler, and now he’s saying it all the time!”). Also, as you will learn when we consider mindset and cognitive framing, children benefit from the fact that they don’t tend to judge themselves and focus on failure the way adults do. A baby learning to walk falls over many, many times in the process. They may bump their knees and cry, but at that age they are unlikely to think “Gosh, I’m just not cut out for walking. I’m bad at it. I just don’t have the talent” and discourage themselves from trying again. They want to get places faster, and keep up with parents and siblings, and their desires in combination with a lack of negative rumination (deep or considered thought) about their failures drive their learning process forward at an incredible pace.

Transference

Transference means that we can take advantage of neuroplasticity and its benefits in learning a particular thing to help us learn other similar things. The ability to adapt and learn from one training experience can improve the acquisition of similar behaviours.

During the learning process, it is important for both the learner and the educator to consider how a specific skill or activity can be applied to other real-world situations, promoting broader-based learning and the building of more extensive capacities.

How to Leverage Neuroplasticity in your Own Learning

At this point you should have a basic understanding of what neuroplasticity is, and some of the principles that differentiate an approach to learning that will help you harness neuroplasticity from approaches that don’t, but this is still relatively theoretical. In this section we’re going to look at three aspects of how to learn that will set you up to get the most out of any learning experience you chose to enter into.

Deep Practice

A number of times so far we’ve referred to practising “in the right way” to take advantage of what we’ve learned about how neuroplasticity can support optimal learning. Coyle (2009) focuses extensively on how to practise things for the most effective activation of neuroplasticity, calling this approach “deep practice”. A similar approach is discussed by Erikson and Pool (2016) using the term “deliberate practice”, but we’ll stick to “deep practice” here. The key difference between the traditional approach to learning and the deep practice approach is that the traditional approach “views learning as a way to achieve mastery of something up to the boundary of your innate potential; with deep practice, the goal is not just to reach some predefined limit to your potential but to build potential itself, and in doing so, to make possible things that were not possible before" (Halse, 2018).

Deep practice has four defining characteristics (Coyle, 2009), as follows:

Highly targeted
The learner has very clearly articulated and understood goals, and keeps them in the forefront of their mind to guide their practice. Let’s consider a coding student. A common beginner goal would be something like “I want to get better at coding”. A targeted goal that forms a real, useful mental blueprint to guide very specific practise might be something like “I want to write shorter more succinct code and master creating iteration in a program so as not to repeat code unnecessarily, by identifying core components that I can iterate on and using looping structures to manage when and how many times specific sections of code are repeated.”
Error focussed
Mistakes are welcome in deep practice because they highlight the areas the learner needs to focus on to achieve mastery. They are never ignored, and inform both how the learner approaches highly targeted practice and what they focus on. This approach to mistakes helps the learner to avoid the pitfall of negative discouraging emotions holding them back from learning. Imagine an Olympic gymnast who is trying to perfect their form and is told by their coach that their landings are too shaky. With a deep practice approach, this would not be something to feel embarrassed or disappointed about, but a vitally useful piece of feedback they are grateful to receive, and use to guide them in their quest to ultimately achieve a gold medal. In learning to code (as you will soon be doing), your development environment will provide feedback when you try to run code that contains errors. This can be particularly frustrating for people who don't have a positive error-focussed mindset; if you respond to each error as a personal failure you will soon get discouraged and depressed in coding. If, however, you can shift your mindset to embrace the opportunities errors provide to narrow in on where you need to focus to achieve mastery, not only will you avoid becoming easily discouraged, but you will be maximising your neuroplastic learning potential.
Variable in depth
Because deep practice is highly targeted, the aspects of mastering something that require more attention are identified and focussed on more than those that need less attention. They are not, however, addressed in isolation; the learner varies their depth of focus, zooming in on specific areas of difficulty to practise these and then zooming out to fit them into the bigger picture of what they’re trying to learn. For example, if a student was learning to sing Ave Maria but could not hit the highest notes, they would focus on bars of the music with the problematic notes and practise these, and as they started to improve, increase practising the piece as a whole, getting a higher-level picture of their proficiency.
Broken down and reintegrated
This ties in with variable depth. Focusing on problem areas and then zooming in on these to work on them until greater mastery is achieved, is in itself a way of breaking the learning activity down into manageable pieces. As the learner gains proficiency they put the pieces back together and extend their practice to address the whole problem again. Imagine an artist who wants to specialise in portraits, but struggles to draw eyes and mouths. The artist could break down the whole face they’re aiming to achieve mastery of creating, and work on specific studies of eyes and mouths without the rest of the face being drawn at all. They could then reintegrate those components into drawing or painting full faces, see how they work in the context of a full face, and then repeat the process, improving in this cyclic manner.

So, what might it look like to see these four aspects at play together when a learner is using a deep practice approach? Let’s look at an example from a study of primary school children learning music (Coyle, 2009), in which the researchers describe a little girl applying deep practise when practising the clarinet.

Reread this description. Can you identify some of the defining characteristics of deep practice within it? Now think about something you’re trying to learn. What would deep practise look like for whatever it is? How could you modify your current approach so as to achieve a deep practice approach? Next time you embark on learning something new, try this same method of identifying how to practise it in a way that is highly targeted, error focused, variable in depth, broken down and then reintegrated.

Contextualisation

The importance of contextualisation in learning was largely established by Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, in his theory of cognitive development. Piaget said that the things we know are organised into mental structures he called “schema”, ordered collections of knowledge organised by common elements - in other words, mental models we create in long term memory. According to Piaget, “children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based” (Mcleod, 2023). Piaget theorised that when we learn, we add new knowledge to a schema, or adjust the schema to accommodate the new knowledge. We can also build new schemata, but having an existing schema to which to relate new information, whether by adding to the schema or adapting it, makes learning easier and quicker. In neurological terms, we can think of schema as neural networks. Halse (2018) writes about the role of contextualisation in effective practice for learning, explaining that “learning is simply creating and strengthening physical neural pathways. Linking new learning to what we already know or understand means we can draw on existing neural pathways (extending them or making them faster) and expand existing areas of the brain that process related information or have similar cognitive (thinking) roles. When learning is placed in context, greater brain cell activity - neural activation - is achieved, which facilitates deeper learning, and better memory formation and retrieval.”

Metacognition

As previously defined, metacognition refers to thinking about our thinking. In the same way, learning about your learning, as you have been doing so far, is a metacognitive training activity. Growing your metacognitive capacity has been shown to increase motivation, increase self-regulation (for example, managing frustration in learning), and to help create more independent learners.

Probably the most important principle to retain, if you were to forget absolutely everything else, is that you as an individual have the power to grow your own intellectual capacity: if something is too hard for you to grasp at a given point, by practising with determination and grit, and applying the concepts of deep practice and contextualisation that we have covered, you will be able to to grow your cognitive abilities.

Spaced Repetition and Higher Order Learning

You’ve probably experienced studying for a test, and later, after some time has passed, finding you don’t remember what you studied. Forgetting is a normal part of learning, and makes sense from a neuroplasticity perspective. If something is very important for your survival, you’re likely to encounter the thing or need to recall what you know about it frequently. With repetition, the memory is entrenched and access to it gets faster, as you have learned earlier. Pierce J. Howard, author of “The Owner’s Manual for the Brain” (1994), writes:
“Work involving higher mental functions, such as analysis and synthesis, needs to be spaced out to allow new neural connections to solidify. New learning drives out old learning when insufficient time intervenes”

When we learn a new thing, and don’t reinforce it, we naturally forget more and more of it as time goes on. In the 1880’s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered the study of how fast we forget. His research was extended by Piotr Wozniak in 1985, resulting in the production of a “forgetting curve” (often, erroneously, ascribed to Ebbinghaus) which represents how memories decay over time.

What Wozniak found was not just that refreshing the memory helps us to retain it, but that there is an optimal pattern of timing for repetition of things we’ve learned. This concept is known in learning psychology as spaced repetition. A related point of interest is that properly timed space repetition can facilitate better learning in a shorter space of time than cramming new knowledge over a short period of time.

Watch this video, which (despite being made for beginner medical students) gives a good explanation of the forgetting curve. This video looks at spaced repetition in learning to code, and introduces a software support system for this. There are a number of apps like this, with new ones being released and existing ones dying out all the time, so it’s better for you to Google the topic for current results than for us to recommend a specific solution here.

The optimal spacing for spaced repetition is contentious, with different studies claiming different time intervals, and some suggesting fixed intervals while others suggest gradually increasing intervals. Zijlstra (2023) acknowledges this problem and suggests a possible template for spaced repetition drawn from exploration of a number of studies and apps, as follows:

Although spaced repetition has some proven benefits, just how great those benefits are is also a contentious topic, with some educators and researchers suggesting that there are better approaches to entrenching learning that focus on things like how learning is encoded. One such critic of spaced repetition is Dr Justin Sung, a medical doctor turned learning specialist. He believes that relying on a technique like spaced repetition encourages learners to memorise new things without contextualising them in such a way that they connect to existing neural networks, which is needed to activate higher order learning processes. If you didn’t watch either of the two previous videos in this section, you have to make time for this one - Dr Sung’s TED talk on the difference between studying and learning, and activating higher order learning processes, is really insightful!

Neuroplasticity Case Study

In closing this section on the neuroscience of learning, we’re going to look at a case study about someone whose early learning prognosis was bleak, but who overcame high biological odds using merely immense determination and the application of neuroplastic principles to her learning. In the process she contributed to the field of neuroplasticity knowledge, such that her work has helped many children overcome learning challenges using neuroplasticity-based exercises.

The power of neuroplasticity for cognitive development and recovery has been proved over many years by multiple peer-reviewed studies. This is even true for people with congenital brain deficiencies (i.e. brain problems they were born with), as demonstrated in the case of Barbara Arrowsmith Young (Doidge, 2007). She was born with well-developed frontal lobes, but an "asymmetrical" brain; the rest of her brain had not developed properly. As a child she faced severe limitations, and her parents were told never to expect anything much from her.

Due to the undeveloped areas of her brain, Barbara had trouble pronouncing words, trouble navigating around objects and not walking or running into them, and trouble remembering where she left anything or which desk was hers in class. She struggled with extreme clumsiness (dropping items, tripping and falling often), had trouble seeing more than a few letters at a time on a page of writing, troubling with rotating letters and numbers, and trouble understanding grammar, logic, maths, or cause and effect. Because she couldn't understand cause and effect, it was also difficult to learn social rules, or connect things she did with the consequences of those actions. Some concepts you might consider simple were impenetrably puzzling - for example, she also couldn't understand the difference between phrases like "my mother's aunt" and "my aunt's mother", no matter how often it was explained, or even the difference between the concepts of right and left.

Despite her disabilities, Barbara was extremely persistent, and eventually reached graduate school at university, studying education. She was interested in how to help others who faced cognitive challenges, and came across research about neuroplasticity. She became obsessed with the idea of creating and using learning exercises to help children with cognitive challenges. She spent hours every week for many years working on developing these exercises and practising them herself, slowly training her brain to create ways of working around her disabilities. Today, not only has Barbara become a leading researcher and academic in her field, but she is described as “sharp and funny, with no noticeable bottlenecks in her mental processes. She flows from one activity to the next... a master of many skills" (Doidge, 2007).

Barbara is one of many interesting documented cases of cognitive growth and transcendence of limitations. Other noteworthy areas of cognitive recovery include recovery from debilitating strokes, and using neuroplastic techniques to assist people in recovery from various mental illnesses including anxiety, compulsions, and addictions.

The Neuropsychology of Learning

The Biology of Neuroplasticity

The Principles of Neuroplasticity

Use It or Lose It

Specificity

Repetition

Intensity

Time

Salience

Age

Transference

Pause and Reflect

How to Leverage Neuroplasticity in your Own Learning

Deep Practice

Contextualisation

Metacognition

Pause and Reflect

Spaced Repetition and Higher Order Learning

Neuroplasticity Case Study

Pause and Reflect