Learning makes brain cells work together, not apart
Learning makes brain cells work together, not apart
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/learning-makes-brain-cells-work-together-not-apart-694722/
Publish Date: 2026-03-05 14:09:00
Source Domain: www.rochester.edu
A new study challenges a long-standing theory in neuroscience and could reshape how scientists think about perception, learning disorders, and artificial intelligence.
When you get better at a skill—recognizing a familiar face in a crowd, spotting a typo at a glance, or anticipating the next move in a game—sensory neurons in your brain become more coordinated, sharing information rather than acting more independently. That’s the conclusion of a new study by researchers at the University of Rochester and its Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, published in Science, which challenges a long-held assumption in neuroscience that learning improves efficiency by minimizing repetition across neural signals.
Led by Shizhao Liu, a graduate student in the labs of Ralf Haefner and Adam Snyder, both faculty members in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the study shows that learning instead increases shared activity among neurons. The findings could provide insights into learning disorders and inspire more flexible, human-like artificial intelligence tools.
“The dominant view in neuroscience has been that learning makes the brain more efficient by pushing neurons to act more independently, so information can be read out more cleanly,” Liu says. “Our results support a different idea, that sensory areas of the brain aren’t just passively encoding the world. They’re actively performing inference by combining what’s coming in with what the brain has learned to expect.”
How learning reshapes neural teamwork
For decades, researchers believed that learning streamlined how the brain processes information by reducing shared activity among neurons, allowing information to be read out more efficiently. The idea shaped how researchers thought about everything from perception to decision-making.
But the research from Liu, Haefner, Snyder, and their team suggests a different mechanism. Rather than becoming more independent, neurons become more…
