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When you practise a skill, the same groups of nerve cells become active together again and again, and the connections between them grow stronger. This strengthening, part of what scientists call neuroplasticity, is how practice slowly turns effort into ability.

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The story behind the card

The Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb proposed the idea in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior: when one nerve cell repeatedly helps to fire another, the link between them becomes more efficient. It is often summed up as “cells that fire together wire together”. In 1973 Timothy Bliss and Terje Lømo found such strengthening in the brains of rabbits in Oslo: after bursts of electrical stimulation, connections in the hippocampus, a region vital for memory, stayed stronger for hours. The effect is called long-term potentiation. Practice can reshape the brain within days. In 1995 Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues at the US National Institutes of Health had volunteers practise a one-handed, five-finger piano exercise for two hours a day. After five days, the area of the motor cortex that controls the finger muscles had grown larger.

Türkçe oku
Bir beceriyi çalıştığınızda aynı sinir hücresi grupları tekrar tekrar birlikte etkinleşir ve aralarındaki bağlantılar güçlenir. Bilim insanları beynin bu tür değişimlerine nöroplastisite der. Pratik, başta zorlanarak yaptığınız bir işi zamanla beceriye bu yolla dönüştürür.

Bu fikri Kanadalı psikolog Donald Hebb, 1949'da yayımlanan The Organization of Behavior (Davranışın Örgütlenmesi) adlı kitabında ortaya attı: Bir sinir hücresi başka bir hücreyi tekrar tekrar uyarırsa aralarındaki bağlantı güçlenir. Bu düşünce çoğu zaman “birlikte ateşlenen hücreler birbirine bağlanır” diye özetlenir. 1973'te Timothy Bliss ve Terje Lømo, Oslo'da tavşanların beyninde böyle bir güçlenmeyi gözlemledi: Kısa elektrik uyarılarından sonra, bellek için hayati önemdeki hipokampus bölgesinde bağlantılar saatlerce güçlü kaldı. Bu olaya uzun süreli potansiyasyon, yani uzun süreli güçlenme denir. Pratik, beyni birkaç gün içinde bile değiştirebilir. 1995'te Alvaro Pascual-Leone ve ABD Ulusal Sağlık Enstitüleri'ndeki ekibi, gönüllülere her gün iki saat, tek elle çalınan beş parmaklı bir piyano alıştırması yaptırdı. Beş gün sonra beyin kabuğunda parmak kaslarını yöneten alan genişlemişti.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Hebbian theory
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Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change its connections, and even its structure, in response to experience. It is strongest in childhood but continues through adult life, which is why adults can still learn a language, an instrument or a new skill, even if it often takes them longer.

For much of the 20th century scientists believed the adult brain was more or less fixed. Brain scans changed that view. In 2004 researchers in Germany taught adults to juggle three balls over three months; scans showed extra grey matter, the tissue packed with nerve cells, in areas that track moving objects, and it shrank back once they stopped practising. A follow-up in 2008 found the same kind of change in volunteers around 60 years old, although they learned less well than 20-year-olds. The best-known example comes from London, where Katherine Woollett and Eleanor Maguire followed trainee taxi drivers for four years as they memorised the city's 25,000 streets. Those who passed the exam gained grey matter at the back of the hippocampus, a region involved in finding our way; those who failed, and people who never trained, showed no such change.

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When jazz pianists improvised inside a brain scanner, an area at the front of the brain linked to self-monitoring grew quieter, while a nearby area linked to self-expression became more active.

Charles Limb, an ear surgeon and jazz saxophonist, and the neuroscientist Allen Braun ran the study at the US National Institutes of Health and published it in PLOS ONE in 2008. Six professional jazz pianists lay in an fMRI scanner, which maps brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow, and played a small keyboard built to work inside it. Each played memorised music, then improvised over the same backing. While they improvised, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tied to planning and checking one's own actions, quietened, and the medial prefrontal cortex, tied to expressing oneself, became busier. With only six players it is a small study, and each brain region has many roles.

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Living for years with loud road, rail or aircraft noise can harm health. It is linked to broken sleep, poorer learning in children and a higher risk of heart disease, and the body keeps reacting even after people stop noticing the sound.

In 2020 the European Environment Agency estimated that at least 113 million people in Europe live with long-term road traffic noise of 55 decibels or more, averaged over day and night; that is the level the European Union uses to report harmful noise, and the World Health Organization recommends keeping road noise below 53. Studies link such exposure to disturbed sleep, raised stress hormones, poorer reading and memory in children near airports and busy roads, and more high blood pressure and heart disease. People do get used to a sound in the sense that they notice it less, but sleep studies show that heart rate still jumps when a lorry or plane passes at night.

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Spreading your review of something across several sessions over days or weeks usually fixes it in long-term memory far better than cramming the same amount into one sitting. Psychologists call this the spacing effect.

The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured it in the 1880s, memorising lists of nonsense syllables and testing himself; he published the results in 1885. It has since become one of the most reliably repeated findings in psychology. Cramming leaves a feeling of fluency that fades fast; spaced practice feels harder but lasts longer, because recalling something just as it starts to slip strengthens the memory. The best gap depends on the material and how long you need to remember it. No single schedule fits every case, but reviewing a day later, then a few days later, then a week or more later is a sensible start. Flashcard apps such as Anki are built on this principle, and many medical students and language learners rely on them.

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Walking helps people come up with new ideas: in Stanford experiments published in 2014, participants produced on average about 60 per cent more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. The gain was clearest on tasks with many possible answers, such as finding unusual uses for an everyday object.

Psychologists Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran four experiments with 176 people. Their main test asked for as many uses as possible for an everyday object, a measure of 'divergent thinking': the kind that produces many options rather than one right answer. Walking raised the scores of 81 per cent of participants, whether they walked outdoors or on a treadmill facing a blank wall, so the scenery was not the explanation. The boost even lingered for a while after people sat down again. Walking helped much less with puzzles that have a single correct answer, which psychologists call convergent thinking: only 23 per cent improved on those.

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