Your musical talents could be determined by a fatty substance in your brain: Myelin helps you learn new skills.

Published: 18:24 pm, 16 October 2014.

Source: Jonathan o’Callaghan for mailonline.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2795922/your-musical-talents-determined-fatty-substance-ear-myelin-helps-brain-learn-new-skills-study-claims.html

Science field: Medical science.

Summary:

Scientists have discovered that an electrically insulating substance known as myelin is essential to our brains learning new skills. They claim that when a skill, such as playing the piano, is learned later in life, myelin must be made in order to retain the skill. However, researchers claim that once a new skill has been learnt, it is retained even after myelin production stops.

Glossary:

-         Myelin: a white tissue forming an insulating sheath (myelin sheath) around certain nerve fibres. Damage to the myelin sheath causes neurological disease, as in multiple sclerosis.

-         Cell: the most basic unit of structure of an organism.

-         Cognition: the mental act of learning; understanding; perception.

-         Spinal cord: the thick cord of nerve tissue within the spinal canal, which in man gives rise to 31 pairs of spinal nerves, and together with the brain forms the central nervous system.

-         Axon: the long threadlike extension of a nerve cell that conducts nerve impulses from the cell body.

Review:

Our brain is a very complex organ that serves as the centre of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. The brain exerts control over our body and is responsible of our reflexes. The brain is formed by thousands of neurons that are connected to axons, in this way it can carry out trains of signal pulses. This discovery of myelin helps us to understand how we remember mechanical movements, like for example the riding of a bicycle.  Whenever we learn how to ride a bicycle, later after some years, even if we didn’t ride it again we didn’t forget how to ride it. Perhaps we notice some difficulties in the beginning but after some minutes of adaption, it looks like those years haven’t passed. This article explains us that scientist have discovered the source of how we don’t forget an action or mechanical movement. Myelin is the cause of this actions. When we learn a new skill our brains receives this new information and it retains it by synthetizing myelin. This substance is locked in our brain, connects different parts of the brain, even when its productions stops we still retain the information of the skill.

Knowing the characteristics of this substance scientist could synthetize it to create a medicine for people who have difficulties of learning or keep the information of a new skill. People with problems of coordination of its body could make use of this medicine, helping them to remember or recall the different movements that are basic in our lifestyle. It is still a long way because it is in a face of experiments to prove that the myelin really takes its place in this “retaining skill” activity.

 

 

Written by Rebeca Mees.