Showing posts with label Learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Learning. Show all posts

Teaching Young bees


Honey bees have a well organized career path with different duties at different ages. When young, they sort out the incoming nectar, feed the larvae, keep the place tidy, and build new comb. Later on, they become foragers and collect water, nectar and pollen.

They can be trained to take home sucrose and recruit others to help and scents can be used to take them to fresh sources. Young, eager foragers are the easiest to train using scents to indicate sources according to a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology (1).

When freshly emerged, the young bees have trouble getting their minds on the job and don’t do so well. The same is true of old foraging hands who have got set in their ways. For the old girls there isn’t much hope, but for the young ones science can come to the rescue.

Behrends and Scheiner showed that by spiking the nectar with octopamine, the young foragers got right on top of the task in hand. It wasn’t helpful with teaching an old bee new tricks though.

Octopamine is a neural hormone that plays a major role in learning and memory for bees and fruit flies, but clearly only on the young ones. It has other functions as well, but so far we don’t know how they change with age. For us it has rumored fat control properties, but doesn’t seem to help with our learning as the addition in slimming remedies haven’t been shown to be all that efficacious.

  1. A. Behrends & R. Scheiner, J. Exp. Biol., 215, 1076, (2012)


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Use Them Or Loose Them



Unfortunately, as we go through life, we lose some of our neurons and the number that go will depend on things like diet and not doing all those things that our family doctors keep nagging us about. However, we do have a lot of them and they normally don’t disappear very rapidly.

From this point there is good news and bad news. The good news is that we make more in our hippocampus at a steady if not rapid rate. The bad news is that a lot of these die off in a week or two, so this is something that we need to pay attention to.

So what to do? We have to use them. They like to be useful and well exercised. We exercise them by putting them to work, and to do that, we have to learn new things. To study this Nokia et al from Rutgers U employed a team of adult male lab rats and trained them to wink in response to pulses of white noise, (well blink really) (1).

They were taught to give a trace blink or a long delayed blink. The electrical activity in the brains was measured and finally their new neurons were checked out and found to be surviving. The electrical oscillations in their hippocampi at around the 10 Hz range showed that they were learning.

The important thing is that learning new things sets up new neurons for a long life. If you change the task that has just been learned, you save more new neurons from ending up on the scrapheap rather than just exercising the ones that had just been deployed on the first version.

For us non-lab rats, our best strategy is not to just do crosswords (that’s the same task over and over,) but to try taking on something more difficult. Like learning to play a musical instrument and then try to learn more and more difficult pieces.

There are other things to take up too if your family or neighbors have trouble with your new violin or trombone. They don’t have to be loud. The result of the huge memory training that London cabbies go through is an increase in the size of their hippocampi as they learn all the back streets, alleyways, one-ways, and building locations (2).


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031375
  2. http://james-goodwin.blogspot.com/2011/12/building-knowledge.html



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Building The Knowledge


London Taxi Photo: David Iliff, License: CC-BY-SA 3.0


The classic source of information for a newcomer in any major city was the taxi driver. Usually they knew their city in detail and would drive you around the important features, (for a fee of course,) while educating you in the politics and the comings and goings of the important and beautiful people of the place. Now the GPS has replaced that detailed mental map and you get more politics and gossip than education.

London, though, is hanging on to tradition. GPS units are not for the London cabbie who needs to find short cuts to dodge the usual traffic jams. The cabbie’s job needs more brain than can be found in a little box of electronics. Flexibility and instant decisions are required in addition to the map.

To get a Hackney Cab License in the City of London, a potential cab driver has to study hard to acquire “The Knowledge”. It can take about four years to pack the details of 320 routes around Charing Cross into one's brain. Details, details and more details have to be instantly recalled. How many of us could instantly recall any one of 25,000 different streets let alone not fail to mention one of 20,000 landmarks when asked.

That’s a lot of “Knowledge” to stuff into anyone’s head and Woollett and Maguire of U College have followed the stuffing process with 79 prospective London cabbies. Of course, the big magnet was rolled out and fMRI scans were done over the four-year training period (along with controls of course).

Some of the candidates showed increasing gray matter building up in the front part of their brains, their posterior hippocampi to be exact.  These guys passed the test and got their licenses. The ones whose brains didn’t change failed and are now going by bus.

It is interesting to note that their heads didn’t get bigger to accommodate the fresh gray matter. It appears that the failing potential cabbies were able to do better on complex visual memory tasks than the passing ones. So it seems that the spatial memory required for  “The Knowledge” takes up a lot of space and crowds out other functions. All part of the price for getting a license to drive the rich and famous as well as you or I, I suppose. 
  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16086233
  2. K. Woollett & E.A.Maguire, J. Curr. Biol, (2011), doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.018