Old Owls Can Learn New Tricks, Slowly

Findings could help scientists better treat older adults with brain injuries

THURSDAY, Sept. 19, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Old owls may be wise, but they can learn even more if they're taught in small steps.

That what scientists found in a new study that appears in tomorrow's issue of Nature.

The discovery by Stanford University Medical Center researchers may provide clues about how to treat adults with brain injuries.

"Instead of asking the owls to learn in one large step, we broke the problem down into small steps. We found that they could learn substantially more this way," says first author Brie Linkenhoker, a Stanford graduate student.

She and her colleagues did their study on barn owls, who develop a mental map of their surroundings that aligns their hearing with their vision. When a barn owl hears a noise from a certain location, a nerve cell fires in the map region of the owl's brain. That same nerve cell fires when the owl sees something at that same location.

Using this mental map, the owls are able to target prey with extreme accuracy.

Previous experiments showed the brains of young barn owls were able to adapt when they were fitted with lenses that shifted their seeing to the right or left by 17 degrees. However, adult barn owls weren't as adaptive and were only able to shift their mental map by 9 percent of the amount of adjustment seen in the young owls.

In this study, the adult barn owl's vision was shifted in small increments. Instead of making a single 17-degree adjustment in their vision, five adult owls were fitted with incrementally shifted lenses. The owls' vision was shifted 6 degrees, then 11 degrees and then 17 degrees.

With this incremental shift, the adult owls were able to shift their mental map by 53 percent of the amount of adjustment seen in the young owls.

Study co-author Eric Knudsen says learning how brains of older animals are able to adapt may help treat brain injuries in older humans. He notes that after a brain injury, a child can recover more quickly than an adult.

More information

Here's more on brain injuries.

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