The Drug That Could Help Your Inflexible Adult Brain Learn a New Language

Curse your parents for not getting you into language school when you were three? Regret not taking up multiple instruments while you still had a chance? Then you'll be happy to hear that thanks to a new study by Harvard professor Takao Hensch, there may be a drug that could have us thinking like kids again.

Valproate is an epilepsy drug, said to restore brain plasticity and facilitate faster skill acquisition meaning that an adult's brain should be able to learn things as if they were young again. A professor of molecular and cellular biology, Hensch believes that his discovery may mean a re-creation of the most critical period in development, normally lost after childhood.

"There are a number of examples of critical-period type development, language being one of the most obvious ones," Hensch told NPR. "So the idea here was, could we come up with a way that would reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?"

The ability to learn a language fluently or attain perfect pitch are such that they must be perfected within a critical brain development period, before a child is seven (though perfect pitch also requires the right genetics). After being shown to assist adult mice in learning habits usually impossible to develop after youth, the drug was recently tested on a group of healthy, adult men with no previous musical training.

And the results were startling. Given a series of online ear-training exercises to complete over a two-week period, they showed significant pitch improvement, as opposed to a lack of development from those who were given the placebo. "It's quite remarkable since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch," he said.

Of course, the drug holds some inherent risks. "I should caution that critical periods have evolved for a reason, and it is a process that one probably would not want to tamper with carelessly," said the professor. "If we've shaped our identities through development, through a critical period, and have matched our brain to the environment in which we were raised, acquiring language, culture, identity, then if we were to erase that by reopening the critical period, we run quite a risk as well."

It is undeniable that the implications for learning through Valproate are immense. Only time will tell how it is used.

Via Gizmodo. Image bytrekkyandy via photopin cc