{"id":216486,"date":"2025-06-24T02:21:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T07:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/zoning-out-could-be-beneficial-and-may-actually-help-us-learn-faster"},"modified":"2025-06-24T02:21:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T07:21:00","slug":"zoning-out-could-be-beneficial-and-may-actually-help-us-learn-faster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/zoning-out-could-be-beneficial-and-may-actually-help-us-learn-faster","title":{"rendered":"Zoning out could be beneficial\u2014and may actually help us learn faster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/zoning-out-could-be-beneficial-and-may-actually-help-us-learn-faster2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring the new mall may seem unproductive, but new research from HHMI\u2019s Janelia Research Campus suggests it could play an important role in how our brains learn.<\/p>\n<p>By simultaneously recording the activity of tens of thousands of neurons, a team of scientists from the Pachitariu and Stringer labs discovered that learning may occur even when there are no specific tasks or goals involved.<\/p>\n<p>Published in <i>Nature<\/i>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-025-09180-y\" target=\"_blank\">new research<\/a> finds that as animals explore their environment, neurons in the visual cortex\u2014the brain area responsible for processing <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/visual+information\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">visual information <\/a>\u2014encode visual features to build an internal model of the world. This information can speed up learning when a more concrete task arises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring the new mall may seem unproductive, but new research from HHMI\u2019s Janelia Research Campus suggests it could play an important role in how our brains learn. By simultaneously recording the activity of tens of thousands of neurons, a team of scientists from the Pachitariu and Stringer labs discovered [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}