• Question: I understand that motor skills, such as how fast i type, can be improved. Why is that our skills can only be improved to some extent and why is it that some people can improve theirs further than others?

    Asked by p501 to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 20 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 20 Mar 2010:

      Wow, tough one! More often than not, skills can generally improve until you reach the physiological limits of your body. So ultimately, you can only type so fast because your fingers can only move so fast (due to physical nature of muscles and the speed of nerve conduction, etc). So physical skills are limited only by your own physiology.

      For other skills, this is harder to answer. In general, people can often improve their skills in most areas well beyond any levels they expect but it requires massive practice. Things like musical, language, mathematical abilities, etc are all highly trainable with sufficient motivation.

      Why do individual seems to show advantages over others in areas? No one really knows. Some of it probably comes from genetic factors that lead to brain predispositions. But even more is probably due to environmental reinforcers — some random circumstance means you got good feedback early in some area and you were encouraged and felt good at it, which of course encourages you to do more with it.

      What do you think?

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Not really my area, but I will give it a go. Well, how good we are at something (lets say running the 100m) depends largely on how hard we train/how good shape we are in. The more practise you do at something and the more you train your body to do it. So, a professional athlete will always beat me in a race because he spends all day on the track and I spend mine in a lab.

      However, out bodies have limits which no amount of training will get us past, and these are defined, at least in part, but our genes. That means that if two professional athletes race, even though they have both trained as hard as possible, one will probably still be better just because of how long his legs are/how strong his muscles are capable of being etc. That being said, if one of them has a better running “style” they might still have the upper hand.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 21 Mar 2010:

      Yes, even as adults we can improve our skills in different tasks. There are many studies show increases or decreases in functional activation and connectivity (the functional ‘working together’ of several brain areas) associated with learning a task. There is evidence that the adult human brain can show anatomical changes too, in grey (neuron cell bodies) and white matter (the long tracts of nerve fibres that are surrounded by fatty myelin). A recent study from last year trained adults to juggle over a period of 6 weeks. MRI brain imaging techniques before and after training showed increases in grey and white matter in the occipital and parietal lobes of the brain, which the researchers related to the motor and visual coordination involved in juggling.

      The question of why some people learn more than others is a complicated one. There is a lot of evidence for enormous variability in how well people do all sorts of tasks. I see a lot of differences even across the people I test, who are all university students of a similar age and educational experience. Some of the behavioural factors involved might include: experience with similar tasks, the age you began learning a task (the younger the better!), amount of time spent doing the task, attentiveness, use of strategies. It is also the case that the people who are very adept at doing one thing aren’t always the best at another – some people are footballers, some are artists. It’s part of the fabric of a varied gene pool.

      Interestingly, looking back at the neural factors, the authors of the study with jugglers noted that the changes in brain structure were not correlated with how much people actually improved at juggling – as all the participants spent the same time training, it is possible that the changes were practice-related rather than performance-related. They found the same lack of correlation between the amount of changes in grey and white matter. A possible explanation: anatomical changes observed with MRI could reflect a number of possible changes at the cellular level. For example, white matter changes could be due to increased packing density of nerve fibres, or by actual thickening of the fatty myelin sheath of the fibre tracts (the myelin supports faster transmission of nervous impulses). Grey matter could be due to the creation of new cell bodies (neurogenesis) or increased connections between neurons. Better understanding of the precise cellular changes that occur will help to improve our understanding of what underlies the effects seen with MRI. However, it could be that there is variability in both the mechanism and the extent of all these different types of neural changes across people, which may lead to the emergence of differences at a behavioural level across different types of task.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      Hi, very good question. This is one problem that involves what is called as nature and nurture factors. That is, the genetic factors and the environmental factors of the person that is learning the skill. Take for example, athletes training for the olympics. Definitely their build and their height –which cannot be changed just by training– would determine how good they would be at a certain sport, but of course the amount and quality of training would be as important. So… it’s a mix of nature and nurture!

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