Are you smarter than a 5th grader? Probably not
<p dir="ltr">We’ve long suspected that children are “smarter” than us and can learn much faster than adults - but now science has confirmed it as all but true and explained why.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A new study has found that children learning something new experience a rapid boost in GABA, a brain messenger that helps to stabilise newly-learned material, while adults don’t.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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,” Takeo Watanabe, a professor in cognitive and linguistic sciences, said.</p>
<p dir="ltr">With previous research only looking at changes in levels of GABA at a single time-point that wasn’t at a specific time in relation to learning, the scientists set out to measure the levels of GABA in children and adults before, during and after undergoing visual training.</p>
<p dir="ltr">They found that learning something visually triggered an increase in GABA in the visual cortex - the area of the brain that processes information - in children that lasted for several minutes after the training ended.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But, this increase wasn’t observed in adults, with no changes in GABA levels seen at all.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This suggests that children’s brains respond to learning in a way that enables them to learn more quickly and stabilise information faster.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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,” Professor Watanabe said.</p>
<p dir="ltr">With this finding also suggesting that the concentration of GABA would rapidly increase in children’s brains as a result of training, which would allow for the new information learnt to rapidly stabilise, the team also tested whether this would be true.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“In subsequent behavioural experiments, we found that children indeed stabilised new learning much more rapidly than adults, which agrees with the common belief that children outperform adults in their learning abilities,” Dr Sebastian Frank, a cognitive neuroscientist and the study’s first author, explained.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“Our results therefore point to GABA as a key player in making learning efficient in children.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">He said that their results imply that the increased levels of GABA help children outperform adults despite having poorer cognitive control and attention.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“Although children’s brains are not yet fully matured and many of their behavioural and cognitive functions are not as efficient as in adults, children are not, in general, outperformed in their abilities by adults,” Professor Watanabe added.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“On the contrary, children are, at least in some domains such as visual learning, superior in their abilities to adults.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">The researchers said their findings should be explored further in future studies, particularly looking at differences in how the different brain regions mature, as well as how GABA levels affect other types of learning, such as reading and writing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">They published their findings in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.021" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Current Biology</a></em>.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><em>Image: Getty Images</em></p>
