By nikoletas@diplomacy.edu
Publication Date: 2025-11-29 09:05:00
The study suggests that understanding how the brain recombines skills could lead to better AI systems and new treatments for disorders that affect cognitive flexibility.
Researchers have discovered why the human brain remains far more adaptable than AI. A new Princeton study finds that the brain repurposes shared cognitive components to handle a variety of tasks, enabling rapid adaptation to new challenges without having to learn from scratch.
Experiments with rhesus monkeys showed that the prefrontal cortex uses shared “cognitive blocks” that combine and recombine depending on the task, such as judging color or shape. The monkeys completed related categorization tasks, allowing scientists to observe how neural patterns were reused in different activities.
The results suggest that people excel at flexible learning because the brain builds new behaviors from existing mental components. By activating only the necessary blocks and silencing others,…
