Imagine walking into your very first swing dance class. Your feet seem to have a life of their own initially, but by following your instructor’s lead with your eyes, you snag a step or two and begin moving to the rhythm of the big band beat. Just when you feel good, you turn and see that the couple beside you has picked twice as many steps in half of the time. What gives?
It lies in our brains, says breakthrough research from the University of Florida. Conducted under the leadership of Professor of Biomedical Engineering Daniel Ferris, Ph.D., with his former doctoral student Noelle Jacobsen, Ph.D., the study proves that fast learners of athletic skills are neurologically different from their slower counterparts.
Ferris and Jacobsen strapped subjects with electrodes that monitored their brain activity and had them walk on a treadmill with two belts going at different speeds. That forced them to adapt quickly to a new pattern of walking. “Noelle was able to look at the brain activity of the best learners versus the slow learners and, lo and behold, some of the areas that were important were very clear in their brains,” Ferris said.
What may come as the biggest surprise, however, is that it was the pattern in the visual cortex that best distinguished between fast learners and slow learners, which implies an outcome where visual information is very important in the learning of new motor skills. In simple terms, they figured out a way to briefly break vision, speeding up learning to walk on a balance beam, just as was shown earlier by Ferris’s lab.
It’s an insight that applies well beyond dance moves. It might also help explain why vision problems are linked with a higher risk of falling in older people, Ferris said. Difficulty with vision may make it hard to learn new motor skills, and when you’re unable to learn new motor skills, you’re less able to avoid trip hazards.
It took the fast learners about a minute to adjust and find a comfortable walking rhythm on the treadmill. In contrast, the slower learners took four times longer. Besides that, with heightened activity in the visual processing areas, fast learners revealed increased activity in brain areas responsible for planning muscle movements and error correction, for instance, the anterior cingulate cortex.
The findings were published in the journal eNeuro by Jacobsen, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, and Ferris. In this work, just how deeply entangled visual processing and motor learning are is brought into sharp focus, not to mention opening up new vantage points on how we learn to move our bodies.
As Ferris simply put it, “If you’re having trouble with vision, you may have problems learning new motor skills.” This finding explains not only why some seem born to excel in athletics much faster than others; generally, it also explains the principles of motor learning in older adults.