Thaindian News

Washinghton, April 14 (IANS) Temporary changes in brain could speed up learning, paving the way to improved treatments for strokes, tinnitus and chronic pain.

Tinnitus is the perception of sound within the human ear in the absence of corresponding external sound.

It can result from abnormally loud sounds in the ear canal for even the briefest period, ear infections and foreign objects in the ear.

In a breakthrough, University of Texas, Dallas, researchers have found that brain nerve stimulation accelerates learning in lab tests, reports the journal Neuron.

Researchers monitoring brain activity in rats found that brain responses eventually returned to their pre-stimulation state, but the animals could still perform the learned task, according to a Texas statement.

These findings have allowed researchers to better understand how the brain learns and encodes new skills.

Previous studies showed that people and animals that practice a task experience major changes in their brains. But it was not clear whether these changes are just coincidence or whether they truly help with learning.

The current research demonstrates that changes in the brain are meaningful and not merely coincidental, said study author Amanda Reed, from the university’s School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Reed and her fellow researchers used brain stimulation to release neurotransmitters that caused the brain to increase its response to a small set of tones.

Neurotransmitters are the chemicals which allow the transmission of signals from one neuron (nerve cell) to another across synapses, junctions between them.

The team found that this increase allowed rats to learn to perform a task using these tones more quickly than animals that had not received stimulation.