The More We Learn, the Less Our Brain Needs to Work?

Expertise, high performance, and the ability to mobilize the right repertoire at the right moment.

Neuroplasticity · Beta Bursts · Frontal Theta · EEG Microstates · Rock–Scissors–Paper · Connectomic Reserve · Damasian Mind · Body-Territory

Imagine a pianist performing a complex composition while monitoring their breathing, adjusting finger pressure, and anticipating the next musical passage. Beside them, a beginner must concentrate on every note.

Who is using more of their brain?

The question seems simple, but perhaps it is incorrectly framed.

Expertise does not necessarily mean doing less. It may mean organizing more effectively what an organism can do, feel, perceive, and retrieve.

In Blog 10 of BrainLatam's W47/2026 series, we bring together recent research on brain oscillations, motor coordination, memory, and learning.

We want to investigate how the Body-Territory develops high-performance repertoires without confusing efficiency with reduced brain activity.

1. High performance is not simply less effort

For decades, different studies have associated expertise with changes in the amount of brain activity required to perform a particular task.

However, reduced activity in one region does not, by itself, demonstrate greater efficiency.

An organism may redistribute resources, modify strategies, or engage different circuits.

We must also distinguish immediate performance, learning, and retention.

Someone may achieve excellent results after a training session without maintaining that performance later.

High performance must be investigated through what an organism can accomplish, the conditions under which it performs, and the stability of those abilities over time.

2. Rayson: not all beta bursts are alike

In September 2026, Holly Rayson, Sarah Gerson, Jennifer Keating, and colleagues published Functional heterogeneity of beta bursts in childhood reveals a dimensional neural signature of motor skill.

The researchers investigated 41 children, including participants with developmental coordination disorder.

They analyzed transient beta activity events related to sensorimotor processing.

Conventional spectral measurements and overall burst frequency did not clearly distinguish the groups.

However, specific features of the temporal shapes of these events, known as waveform motifs, showed associations with motor performance.

The findings suggest that events classified within the same frequency band may have different temporal organizations with distinct functional associations.

This does not establish that each waveform represents a unique neural mechanism, but it expands what researchers can investigate beyond average measurements.

3. Schipper: nine sessions can reorganize neural timing

In May 2026, Kate Schipper, Mahmoud Hassan, Bogdan Draganski, and colleagues published Beta burst dynamics in the motor cortex are reshaped through sensorimotor refinement.

Participants completed nine sessions of a bimanual coordination task under adaptive and non-adaptive training conditions.

Both conditions produced motor learning.

The adaptive group improved more during training, while the non-adaptive group demonstrated better retention.

With practice, post-movement beta bursts became more temporally concentrated and consistent.

This finding distinguishes two dimensions that are frequently confused: improving during practice does not guarantee greater subsequent retention.

A new question would be whether the temporal stability of these events predicts the ability to perform a skill under conditions different from those experienced during training.

4. Exergaming: scoring higher does not necessarily mean greater cognitive control

In October 2026, Nina Skjæret-Maroni and colleagues published Movement and Frontal Theta Activity During Step-Based Exergaming in Healthy Younger and Older Adults.

The study included 32 participants: 16 younger adults and 16 older adults.

All participants performed a movement-based game called The Mole, with three difficulty levels.

The researchers used accelerometers, mobile EEG, and behavioral performance scores.

Movement quantity showed strong associations with game scores, with correlations of approximately 0.67–0.80.

However, average frontal theta power, between 4 and 7 Hz, showed no consistent statistically significant associations with performance after correction for multiple comparisons.

The scores primarily reflected movement performed during that particular task, not a comprehensive measurement of cognitive control.

5. What might average theta power have concealed?

Skjæret-Maroni's study primarily examined average frontal theta power.

This opens an opportunity for further analysis if the raw recordings are available.

Could brief episodes of theta activity appear around errors, decisions, or motor corrections?

Such events might relate to performance even when average power remains similar across conditions.

However, researchers would need to control for movement-related artifacts.

A temporal association also cannot automatically be interpreted as evidence of causal cognitive control.

The question becomes: which specific events require attentional reorganization while a skill is being performed?

This approach brings frontal theta research closer to investigations of beta bursts.

6. Rock–Scissors–Paper: three functional perspectives

BrainLatam uses Rock–Scissors–Paper as a metaphor for investigating different possibilities of action within the Body-Territory.

Rock represents repertoires embodied through practice. It does not necessarily imply rigidity: exceptional expertise may continue undergoing small refinements.

Scissors represents deliberate analysis, comparison, and strategy selection.

Paper opens a perspective on metacognition, enjoyment, and awareness of one's own performance possibilities.

These categories are not three independent connectomes or three states that can be directly identified through EEG.

They help us ask when each form of functional organization contributes to the task.

An expert can execute embodied movements, analyze an unexpected problem, and consciously monitor their experience without abandoning a well-practiced skill.

7. Confidence in DOING and the limits of a local optimum

Within BrainLatam's framework, confidence in DOING represents practical trust developed through experience, not necessarily religious belief.

A musician trusts certain passages because they have practiced them repeatedly.

That confidence may support expressiveness and high performance.

However, it can also establish a local optimum: a strategy sufficiently effective under familiar conditions.

When the environment changes, continuing to use precisely the same strategy may no longer be appropriate.

The challenge is not to abandon what works, but to recognize when new conditions require exploring other possibilities.

This flexibility is an experimental hypothesis about expertise, not a finding directly demonstrated by the studies discussed above.

8. Expert memory: multiple cues for continuing performance

In Practicing perfection: Piano performance as expert memory, Roger Chaffin and Gabriela Imreh followed the preparation of a professional pianist.

The study demonstrated the importance of musical structures and deliberately practiced retrieval cues.

These cues helped organize execution and provided reference points throughout the performance.

This inspires a question for the dataset published by Shin and colleagues (2026):

Can learned associations be retrieved through different temporal organizations of brain activity?

We could investigate pattern similarity and EEG Microstate sequences across encoding, retrieval, and re-encoding.

However, such analyses would not directly identify alternative anatomical pathways.

9. The Damasian Mind and the high-performing Body-Territory

António Damasio and Hanna Damasio, in Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness, relate homeostatic feelings, images, and subjectivity.

This reminds us that an expert is not merely a brain performing calculations.

The organism breathes, feels, moves, and regulates metabolism while carrying out a task.

Within BrainLatam's 5D Consciousness hypothesis:

“Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as BEING within the metabolism produced.”

The experience of performing well may involve effort, pleasure, confidence, or frustration.

These states cannot be inferred directly from theta power or the occurrence of beta bursts.

We must also investigate the organism living the experience.

10. Connectomic Reserve: more possibilities for reorganization?

In The secret connections of the brain: a connectomic reserve for neuroplasticity?, Roberto Lent, Fernanda Tovar-Moll, and Diego Szczupak propose that relatively underused anatomical connections may contribute to neuroplasticity.

This hypothesis inspires the question of whether expertise increases the range of conditions under which a skill remains accessible.

However, greater functional diversity does not demonstrate the recruitment of anatomical reserve connections.

A complementary investigation could combine structural measurements, EEG, and longitudinal assessments of performance.

The question would be whether different characteristics of available networks help explain adaptation and retention.

11. How can we investigate the Body-Territory during expertise?

We could propose an experiment involving beginners and experienced participants performing a motor skill under predictable and unexpected conditions.

We would record EEG, movement, respiration, ECG, and subjective assessments.

We would compare beta bursts, theta episodes, microstates, and behavioral strategies.

A controlled task modification would then be introduced, followed by a retention assessment.

We could also manipulate feedback conditions and opportunities for correcting errors, investigating whether perceived psychological safety influences exploration and learning.

These factors were not directly demonstrated in the exergaming experiment.

The objective would be to discover which combinations of states support sustained performance and which facilitate adaptation when conditions change.

12. Expertise and Metanoia: what remains after practice?

Metanoia of the Metastable Brain proposes investigating persistent changes in repertoires and possibilities for transitioning between states.

Practice may refine an existing skill, create new strategies, or modify the conditions under which particular knowledge can be retrieved.

We need to distinguish these possibilities experimentally.

The Body-Territory of an expert is not simply one that uses less brain activity.

It is an organism with an embodied history, situated under specific conditions, capable of mobilizing different resources to perceive and act.

Perhaps excellence is not about doing less, but about being able to do what is needed, at the appropriate moment, without losing the capacity to learn again.

In Blog 11, we will investigate how these capacities change through encounters between organisms: hyperscanning, interpersonal coordination, and shared attention.

Meta description: Explore 2026 research on beta bursts, frontal theta, motor learning, and expert memory. What do these findings reveal about high performance and the Body-Territory?

Scientific framing: The studies by Rayson, Schipper, and Skjæret-Maroni provide evidence on specific aspects of motor control and learning. The connections to Rock–Scissors–Paper, 5D Consciousness, Connectomic Reserve, and Metanoia of the Metastable Brain are integrative BrainLatam hypotheses, not causal conclusions established by those studies.

BRAINLATAM | W47/2026 | BLOG 10/12 — ENGLISH VERSION