I guess we are all familiar with the old saying, "practice makes perfect"? Of course, if we do something and mess it up, then it makes more sense that we'd get better at messing it up but somehow we don't; we improve! Researchers at McGill University have made a remarkable discovery that a "single neuron" can be responsible for dynamic change in the way we learn! this process continues until reality meets the expectation. The takeaway from this is; to improve brain/body function, learn more new things; change your brain, change your life!

Life through a two way looking glass

In addition to the research below, which makes no mention of "mirror neurons" (or cebulli neurons), it would be worth mentioning them. Mirror neurons are fired when we do something or observe someone else doing it. Take driving for example. We sit next to our parents and observe them drive, we are, at that moment, learning to drive, all we lack is the tactile experience we gain through real-time practice. This also explains the apparent anomaly I describe in the opening paragraph, if practice makes perfect, why don't we get better at doing it wrong!

When it comes to hypnosis, we are actually using these neurons to create the outcome we desire, in the privacy of our own minds. The proof of that is to the extent we feel the emotion of our inner world as we visualize or dream it. Hypnotherapy is the perfect way to practice the ownership of the state you want to achieve. For example, if you are anxious it can help to experience profound relaxation (the opposite of anxiety) and then discover and address the source of the anxiety. In a sense, you are experiencing the desired state (the absence of anxiety) which makes it more believable that you can live a life without unnecessary anxiety!

The research below just takes us a step closer to understanding the way our wonderful brains work. But what is far more important to you; is how your brain works. It is the degree to which yours varies from the norm, that defines the depth and extent of your issue. The objective of therapy is to get your brain functioning normally!

The Research: 

It takes a surprisingly small cluster of brain cells deep within the cerebellum to learn how to serve a tennis ball or line up a hockey shot. Researchers at McGill University led by Kathleen Cullen from the Department of Physiology have discovered that to learn new motor skills, neurons within the cerebellum engage in elegant, virtually mathematical, computations to quickly compare expected and actual sensory feedback. They then quickly readjust, changing the strength of connections between other neurons to form new patterns in the brain in order to accomplish the task at hand.

"We've known for some time that the cerebellum is the part of the brain that takes in sensory information and then causes us to move or react in an appropriate way," says Cullen. "What we didn't know until now is that single neurons in our brain manage to dynamically track the difference between what the brain expects to take in from the senses and the information it is actually receiving during motor learning. Our research shows that this calculated difference (i.e., "sensory prediction error" signal) is used to rapidly change the patterns and connections between neurons in order to learn new motor skills."

To learn a new motor skill, the brain makes an estimate of the expected sensory inflow that it should get from your sensory system, and the cerebellum uses this prediction to compute the difference between what you intended to do and what you actually did. Elite athletes are not only better at coordinating their movements, but their brains are also better at making these kinds of rapid predictions and readjustments. "A gymnast doing a backflip on a balance beam depends on this ability to precisely compute the mismatch between where they expect to land and where they actually find themselves in order to land squarely on the beam. But the research is equally relevant to stroke and multiple sclerosis patients and to the clinicians who treat them," says Cullen.

The research was done by carrying out a trial-by-trial analysis of the responses of brain activity of single cerebellar neurons in macaque monkeys who were engaged in performing specific movement learning tasks.

Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by McGill University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Jessica X Brooks, Jerome Carriot, Kathleen E Cullen. Learning to expect the unexpected: rapid updating in primate cerebellum during voluntary self-motion. Nature Neuroscience, 2015; DOI: 10.1038/nn.4077