Older adults' motor skill development is improved by brain stimulation

Non-invasive brain stimulation can restore optimal motor skill acquisition in people with diminished learning capabilities, e.g. due to age, according to a new study.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a lot of research invested in figuring out how humans acquire sequential motor skills, with a majority of studies in healthy young adults.

Studies involving older individuals (and common experience) show that the older we get, the harder it is and the longer it takes to learn new motor skills, suggesting an age-related decrease in learning ability.

In a new study, Hummel and his PhD student Pablo Maceira-Elvira have found that transcranial brain stimulation can improve the age-related impairment in learning new motor skills.