Neural systems are fluid, even when no learning is taking place

Brain uses both neural 'teacher' and 'tinkerer' in learning - MIT News Office

This seems to be the first publication confirming a property of the brain that's been widely suspected by neuroscientists for years, namely, that neurons change function and behavior over time:



"In earlier work, Bizzi and colleagues measured neural activities in the motor cortex while monkeys manipulated a handle to move a cursor to targets on a screen. In control experiments, the monkeys had to move the cursor to targets in the same way they had been trained. In learning experiments, the monkeys had to adapt their movements to compensate for novel forces applied to the handle.

The scientists found that even when the monkeys were performing the familiar control task, their neural activities gradually changed over the course of the session."

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