Although the old "practice makes perfect" saying is one that you've probably heard numerous times over the course of your life, researchers from Canada's York University have conducted a new brain study that gives some scientific merit to the age-old theory. The team examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of professional ballet dancers in order to get an inside look at the long-term effects of learning.
"We wanted to study how the brain gets activated with long-term rehearsal of complex dance motor sequences," Joseph DeSouza, who participated in the research, said in a press release. "The study outcome will help with understanding motor learning and developing effective treatments to rehabilitate the damaged or diseased brain."
The study examined 11 dancers between the ages of 19 and 50 and asked them to visualize dance movement to music. While this was happening, the researchers examined their brains using fMRI scanning, which measures Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) contrasts, at four points across a span of 34 weeks during which they were learning a new dance.
"Our aim was to find out the long-term impact of the cortical changes that occur as one goes from learning a motor sequence to becoming an expert at it," said Rachel Bar, coauthor of the study. "Our results also suggest that understanding the neural underpinnings of complex motor tasks such as learning a new dance can be an effective model to study motor learning in the real world."
The results revealed that at the seven-week mark, the initial learning and performance stimulated an increase in activation in cortical regions during the visualization of the dance being learned compared to the activation seen in the first week. However, after 34 weeks, it showed a subsequent reduction in activation compared to week seven.
"We found that in the learning process, our brain function makes an inverted 'U' learning pattern from a slow pace at the start, accelerating to a peak at the midpoint, before returning to the original pace, once we have mastered the task," DeSouza said. "An everyday example would be learning to drive a manual car, where you constantly have to think about shifting the gears until you master it and then do it instinctively."
The findings were published in the Jan. 29 issue of PLOS One.
