What part of the brain is responsible for learning?
No single part: different kinds of learning lean on different parts. New facts and events (declarative learning) depend on the hippocampus; habits and skills learned by repetition (procedural learning) on the dorsal striatum, the caudate nucleus and putamen; fine-tuning and timing of movements on the cerebellum; and holding what you are learning in mind on the prefrontal cortex. With practice, cells in the motor cortex on the precentral gyrus change too. [1][2][3][4]
The 3D brain needs JavaScript. The list of parts still says what each one does for learning.
Slice
All 6 parts are lit together. Drag to turn, pinch or scroll to zoom, tap a part on the brain or a name in the list to focus it; .
How they work together
Different memory systems learn different things. The hippocampus is mainly for explicit memories, and damage to it does not stop the learning of new skills: in 1962 Brenda Milner showed that the patient H.M., who could no longer form new memories of events after surgery removed much of both hippocampi, still learned mirror drawing, a hand–eye skill, with no memory of having practised it. [2][1][5]
Skill learning is often described in three stages (Fitts): a cognitive phase of working out what to do, an associative phase of refining it, and an autonomous (procedural) phase in which it runs with little attention. The main motor-skill circuit is the loop from cortex through the basal ganglia and thalamus back to cortex. [2]
At the level of synapses, long-term potentiation, a persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent activity, is widely considered one of the major cellular mechanisms of learning and memory. It was first seen by Terje Lømo in 1966 in the rabbit hippocampus and described with Timothy Bliss in 1973. [11]
In the cerebellum, the Marr–Albus theory proposes that climbing fibres act as a teaching signal that changes the strength of parallel fibre inputs; the best-studied example is eyeblink conditioning, where a neutral cue paired with a puff of air comes to trigger a blink before the puff arrives. Support exists but the theory is still debated. [8]
Habits take time: in a study by Lally and colleagues, people took on average 66 days of repeating a daily behaviour for it to become as automatic as it would get, with a range of 18 to 254 days. The basal ganglia appear to remember the context that triggers a habit. [12]
Working memory is small: Miller put its capacity at around seven items, and Cowan later at about four chunks in young adults, so only a few new pieces can be held in mind at once. [4]
Honest limit: learning changes connections almost everywhere, not only in these six parts. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its connections, occurs at every level of processing, such as the changes in hippocampal structure seen in London taxi drivers learning the city’s streets. Other parts named for learning, such as the amygdala in fear conditioning, are not lit here; the page lights only the six named. [13][14]
Learning and memory are two sides of one process: the memory page lights where facts and events are kept, with the hippocampus shared by both, while skills and habits learned here are stored as procedural memory by the striatum and cerebellum. [2][1]What part of the brain controls memory?
Facts describe anatomy and normal function only. A part lit here takes part in learning; it does not do it alone, and it does other jobs too. The 3D model is the adult male BodyParts3D brain (credits and licence); on it the brainstem includes the midbrain, pons and medulla, so lighting the brainstem lights all three.