(LiveScience.com) Different species and individuals have limits as to what they can learn. For instance, you can't teach your dog to read. But what sets these boundaries? According to a new hypothesis, components of an organism's brain cortex may help determine how well that organism, be it dog, monkey or human, learns and improves its cognitive skills.The cortex is your brain's outer layer, the exterior part you can see if you look at a picture of the whole organ. The new idea posits that small sets of neuronal cells in the cortex, called cortical modules, determine our "cognitive plasticity," that is, our capacity to learn new ways of thinking, or improve upon old ones.
"What [constrains] an individual organisms' ability to learn cognitive skills is essentially the diversity and number of [cortical] modules they have," said Eduardo Mercado III, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. "So, if you think about it like a set of Legos, if you have more Legos, you can build a wider variety of things."
Quality, not size, matters: These cortical modules are very spatially distinct, like circles in a honeycomb-pattern layered over a brain, Mercado said. More>>
