Practice actually does 'make perfect' when it comes to memory and mastering skills

It’s a phrase we’ve all heard countless times: “practice makes perfect.” But is there any truth behind this age-old adage? According to new research, the answer is a resounding yes. Practice, it turns out, is the key to mastering a skill, as it solidifies the neural memory pathways in your brain.

In a collaborative effort, researchers from The Rockefeller University and UCLA have shed new light on the mechanisms behind skill acquisition and memory formation.

Their findings, published in the prestigious journal Nature, reveal that memory representations in working memory circuits transform from an unstable state to a solid one as an individual repeatedly practices a task over time.

Observing the brain in action

To unravel the mysteries of learning and memory, the research team employed a cutting-edge technology developed by Rockefeller’s Alipasha Vaziri.

This innovative tool allowed them to simultaneously observe an astonishing 73,000 cortical neurons in mice as the animals learned and repeated a specific task over a two-week period.

“In this work we show how working memory — the brain’s ability to hold and process information — improves through practice,” explains Vaziri, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neurology and Biophysics.

Vaziri expects that these insights will advance our understanding of learning and memory while helping to address memory-related disorders.

Role of practice in memory transformation

As the mice in the study practiced identifying, recalling, and repeating a sequence of odors, the researchers witnessed a remarkable transformation in their working memory circuits.

Initially, these circuits were unstable, but with repetitive training, they began to stabilize and solidify — a process the researchers refer to as “crystallization.”

“The findings essentially illustrate that repetitive training not only enhances skill proficiency but also leads to profound changes in the brain’s memory circuits, making performance more accurate and automatic,” Vaziri elaborates.

UCLA Health neurologist and corresponding author Peyman Golshani offers a beautiful analogy.

“If one imagines that each neuron in the brain is sounding a different note, the melody that the brain is generating when it is doing the task was changing from day to day, but then became more and more refined and similar as animals kept practicing the task,” Golshani said.

Illuminating the brain with light-beads microscopy

One of the most significant aspects of this study was the use of light-beads microscopy (LBM), a high-speed volumetric imaging technology developed by Vaziri.

LBM enables cellular resolution in vivo recording of neuronal populations up to 1 million neurons — a 100-fold increase compared to previous methods.

Initially, the researchers used standard two-photon imaging of smaller neuronal populations in upper cortical layers but failed to find evidence for memory stabilization from practice.

It was only when they employed LBM to record from over 70,000 neurons in deeper cortical regions that they observed the crystallization of working memory representations accompanying the mice’s increasing mastery of the task.

Practice, learning, and the future of memory research

With these fascinating findings, the researchers have opened up new avenues for exploring the intricacies of learning and memory.

“In the future, we may tackle the role of different neuronal cell types involved in mediating this mechanism, and in particular the interaction of different types of interneurons with excitatory cells,” Vaziri shares.

“We’re also interested in understanding how learning is implemented and could be transferred into a new context — that is, how the brain could generalize from a learned task to some new unknown problems,” Vaziri concluded.

In summary, the study highlights the profound impact of repetition on skill mastery and memory formation. By employing cutting-edge imaging technology, the researchers have unveiled the neural mechanisms that transform working memory representations from an unstable state to a solid one as individuals practice a task repeatedly.

This research deepens our understanding of learning and memory and paves the way for future investigations into the intricacies of the brain.

As we continue to explore the neuronal underpinnings of skill acquisition and memory, we move closer to unlocking the full potential of the human mind and developing innovative approaches to address memory-related disorders.

The full study was published in the journal Nature.

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