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Proof That Practice Does Make Perfect
eldavojohn sends us an article about a discovery by Carnegie Mellon researchers that explains why repetitive studying or training is effective. Previous research had suggested the opposite, which ran counter to nearly everyone's personal experience. Scientists hope that this information will help us to learn more about diseases which affect the memory, such as Alzheimer's. From the article:
"In a series of experiments the researchers blocked different receptors, including NMDA, to see the receptors' effect on long-term neural stimulation. They found that while the NMDA receptor is required to begin neural strengthening, a second neurotransmitter receptor -- the metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptor -- comes into play after this first phase of cellular learning. ...blocking mGlu receptors caused strengthening to stop."
... blocking mGlu receptors caused strengthening to stop.
What I want to know is, how many people block their own mGlu receptors? I mean, there are an awful lot of people that just do not seem capable of learning from experience. Maybe they should be concentrating on finding a drug that will unstick those people's mGlu's.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The research is a little deeper than you imply, it seems to be showing the biochemical mechanism which causes this phenomenon. knowing that repetition helps learning is simple, knowing exactly why it does so is useful if we ever want to do anything interesting with our brains from a technological standpoint.
as a bad analogy: knowing that an apple fell and whacked you on the head is obvious, knowing that the Earth curved space in such a way to allow this is something quite different.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yes, but intuition has no scientific validity, and the point here is not to prove that something is the way we all know it is, but to figure out why it works that way.
... maybe something like this is what ushers in Vernor Vinge's Singularity.
It will be interesting to see if this discovery results in some nifty new drugs to improve the efficiency of the learning process. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to absorb vast quantities of information as easily as remembering a phone number? Hell, if popping a pill could give one the effect of an eidetic memory, it would revolutionize everything. Who cares how hard something is to use? Just read the manual. Once.
Students could graduate from college with the equivalent of a dozen different degrees. Interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas would be dramatically increased, the pace of progress would accelerate
Okay, so maybe it's not such a good idea after all. I'd still like to have a bottle of those pills handy though.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.