Tuning Into Brainwave Rhythms Speeds up Learning in Adults - Neuroscience News

Scientists have shown for the first time that briefly tuning into a person’s individual brainwave cycle before they perform a learning task dramatically boosts the speed at which cognitive skills improve.

The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, will be explored as part of the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition: a research collaboration between Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

Participants got a 1.5-second dose of personalised pulse to set their brain working at its natural rhythm – a technique called “entrainment” – before being presented with a tricky quick-fire cognitive task: trying to identify specific shapes within a barrage of visual clutter.

“We feel as if we constantly attend to the world, but in fact our brains take rapid snapshots and then our neurons communicate with each other to string the information together,” said co-author Prof Victoria Leong, from NTU and Cambridge’s Department of Paediatrics.

“We are tapping into a mechanism that allows our brain to align to temporal stimuli in our environment, especially communicative cues like speech, gaze and gesture that are naturally exchanged during interactions between parents and babies,” said Leong.

The researchers say that, while the new study tested visual perception, these mechanisms are likely to be “domain general”: applying to a wide range of tasks and situations, including auditory learning.