Word: brainful
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...purpose of the scans was to compare the relative levels of spontaneous neural activity in two key brain regions involved in memory - the hippocampus and visual cortex - during rest, both before and after the visual tasks. The NYU team noticed that levels of activity in the two areas were more closely correlated several minutes after people had looked at the images than before they started the experiment. That suggests that the visual-learning tasks had affected the brain's seemingly random firings during rest, and perhaps that the brain was conducting memory-consolidating activity during that time...
What's more, the more closely correlated the brain activity during the rest period, the better the person performed on the tests of recognition. "We found that higher correlations [of activity in the hippocampus and visual cortex] during rest periods leads to high future memory," notes Arielle Tambini, a graduate student in Davachi's lab and lead author of the paper...
While the NYU study tested memory and simple recognition, other recent research looking at activity in the brain at rest and the learning of complex visual tasks has yielded similar results. Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta of Washington University in St. Louis recruited 14 people to use their peripheral vision to identify a hidden pattern - an inverted T - that was flashed briefly on a screen inside an fMRI machine. After each daily training session, lasting one to two hours for about a week, participants were given an hour's rest, during which time Corbetta scanned their brains. (Read "The fMRI Brain Scan...
...reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta's team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. "Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest," notes Corbetta...
...question that has plagued researchers is whether the observed increase in brain activity that occurs after the completion of a mental task is just a ripple or echo effect, rather than a distinct event that helps solidify memories. Harvard researcher Dale Stevens believes he has more or less ruled out the former possibility by showing that even tasks that produce similar levels of neural activity while they are being performed, such as recognizing a face versus a landscape, result in different levels of activity after each task is completed. In Stevens' studies, brain activity remained high after people viewed landscapes...