TEENAGE YEARS MAY BE BEST TIME TO LEARN A NEW SKILL

While a person can never be old enough to learn a new skill, teenage years can make learning easier. It is because the brain reacts more responsively to receiving rewards during adolescence,  finds a study.   Teenage years have been known to be inextricably linked to alcohol abuse,  reckless behaviour and poor choice in friends.   This is due in part to increased activity in the corpus striatum  a small area deeply  hidden away inside the brain.  However,  the new study showed that this increased activity in the corpus striatum does not have only negative consequences. "The adolescent brain is very sensitive  to feedback,"  said Sabine Peters, Assistant Professor at the Leiden University in the Netherlands.   "That makes adolescence  the ideal time to acquire  and retain new information,"  Peters added.  For the study,  published in nature communication,  the team involved  290 subjects between the ages of 8 and 29 and took MRI scans of their brains,  for over a period  of five years.  In the MRI scanner,  participants had to solve a memory game,  while the researchers gave feedback  on the participants' performance. 
The results showed that adolescents responded keenly  to educational feedback.  If the adolescent received  useful  feedback,  then you saw the corpus striatum being activated.  This was not the case with less pertinent  feedback,  for example,  if the test person already  knew the answer,   the researchers said,  the stronger  your brain recognizes that difference,  the better the performance  in the learning task.  Brain activation  could  even predict learning performance two years into the future..