Dr. Michael Kilgard

Whether it's for Japanese or English or Swedish, whatever it might be, our brains can learn anything.

We can fly the space shuttle.

You and I can fly the space shuttle.

We can do brain surgery.

All of us can.

It just takes practice.

That's the miraculous nature of the way our neurons work.

Surprising to me is I think we're close to figuring it out.

How do the neurons work?

1949, this guy Donald Hebb said, fire together, wire together.

That's it.

A lot of us went, does that make any sense?

If all the neurons who fired all wired together, wouldn't everything just fire together and everything just wire together and you'd have a seizure?

And the answer is that's exactly what happens.

So his intuition, though, partly right that the covariance, the co-occurring of these events is an important aspect of learning.

It's not so simple.

we found out that the neuron that fires a little late, they both fire together, but the neuron that fires a little bit late, instead of long-term potentiation, strengthening the connection, we get long-term depression, weakening.

We've been working on the brain 100 years, but we really only figured this out about 25 years ago.

And then the fact that none of that happens, no firing together, wiring together, no out-of-sync fail-to-link, none of that happens if the neuromodulators don't arrive.

And the neuromodulators arrive a couple seconds later.