If you’ve ever had the feeling that your elementary school kids were “smarter” than you — or at least capable of picking up new information and skills faster — a new study in Current Biology on November 15 suggests you’re absolutely right. The new study also offers a reason: kids and adults exhibit differences in a brain messenger known as GABA, which stabilizes newly learned material.
“Our results show that children of elementary school age can learn more items within a given period of time than adults, making learning more efficient in children,” said Takeo Watanabe of Brown University.
Their findings showed that children have a rapid boost of GABA during visual training that lasts after training ends. That’s in marked contrast to the concentrations of GABA in adults, which stayed constant. The findings suggest that children’s brains respond to training in a way that allows them to more quickly and efficiently stabilize new learning.
“It is often assumed that children learn more efficiently than adults, although the scientific support for this assumption has, at best, been weak, and, if it is true, the neuronal mechanisms responsible for more efficient learning in children are unclear,” Watanabe said.
Differences in GABA were one obvious place to look for answers. While previous studies already had, the researchers noted that GABA in kids had only been measured at one time-point. It also wasn’t measured at a time that had any special significance in terms of learning.
So, they set out in the new study to see how GABA levels change before, during, and after learning. They also wanted to see how that differed between kids and adults.
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