Charlotte Stagg

Neuroscientist

If you practice kicking a ball or playing a new piano piece often enough, you get better at doing it. I study what changes happen in your brain when you do that: what happens in your brain as you learn.

We know that the brain helps us to learn by changing the strength of the links between the brain cells – known as neurons. The more we practice doing something, the stronger these connections become and the easier we find it.

We don’t really understand exactly how that happens in people. People usually learn to do things that are really complicated – and so need to use many regions of the brain to learn them.

We also often learn things that take weeks, months or even years to get right. We know that different regions of the brain can start to talk to each other more to help us learn complicated things like football, but we don’t understand exactly how yet! So much exploring still to do!