Motor skill learning requires active central myelination

By I. Mckenzie, David Ohayon, Huiliang Li, Joana Paes de Faria, B. Emery, K. Tohyama, W. Richardson. Science, 2014

1,083 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Myelin-forming oligodendrocytes (OLs) are formed continuously in the healthy adult brain. In this work, we study the function of these late-forming cells and the myelin they produce. Learning a new motor skill (such as juggling) alters the structure of the brain’s white matter, which contains many OLs, suggesting that late-born OLs might contribute to motor learning. Consistent with this idea, we show that production of newly formed OLs is briefly accelerated in mice that learn a new skill (running on a “complex wheel” with irregularly spaced rungs). By genetically manipulating the transcription factor myelin regulatory factor in OL precursors, we blocked production of new OLs during adulthood without affecting preexisting OLs or myelin. This prevented the mice from mastering the complex wheel. Thus, generation of new OLs and myelin is important for learning motor skills. Mice need myelinating cells in the brain to master an unpredictable motor task. [Also see Perspective by Long and Corfas] Learning requires the brain to change We may be leveraging change in our brains more than we have thought. Ohayon et al. knocked out cells responsible for laying down insulating myelin along neuronal axons in the brains of otherwise normal adult mice (see the Perspective by Long and Corfas). The mice lacking the myelin-forming cells were less able to learn a new motor skill involving running on a wheel with unevenly spaced bars. Although we may not run on a wheel, when trying to master new motor skills such as juggling, we too may well rely on similar myelin-producing cells. Science, this issue p. 318; see also p. 298

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/abd83de2fa4e1729c5346a7698df490476028551

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Citations in the corpus

Oligodendrocyte heterogeneity in the mouse juvenile and adult central nervous system (2016, positive): “In this paradigm, running on the wheel leads to an increase in the number of proliferating OPCs after 4 days, followed by an increase in oligodendrocytes after 8 days (25).”
The cingulum bundle: Anatomy, function, and dysfunction (2018, positive): “It is now known that task learning can alter dMRI attributes (Hofstetter et al., 2013; McKenzie et al., 2014; Sampaio-Baptista et al., 2013; Xiao et al., 2016), suggesting a more dynamic role for white matter.”
White matter changes in Alzheimer’s disease: a focus on myelin and oligodendrocytes (2018, neutral): “thus could ultimately affect behavior [58].”
Neuronal activity-dependent control of postnatal neurogenesis and gliogenesis (2018, positive): “…et al. 2013, Faiz et al. 2015, Kuo et al. 2006), and (c) OPC activation and differentiation result in new myelination that is necessary for efficient neuronal activity propagation (Arancibia-Cárcamo et al. 2017, Ford et al. 2015, Pajevic et al. 2014) and motor learning (McKenzie et al. 2014).”