What is it about?
When a behavior becomes second nature — like typing, playing an instrument, or driving home without thinking — it reflects the brain’s remarkable ability to transform effortful actions into automatic ones. Our new study reveals the neural mechanism behind this transformation. The work provides the first direct evidence that practice accelerates memory retrieval within the human hippocampus, allowing learned actions to unfold rapidly and with minimal cognitive effort.
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Why is it important?
Our study provides the first direct neural evidence that automaticity—the ability to perform a task effortlessly after practice—arises from faster memory retrieval within the human hippocampus. Using intracranial EEG, the authors showed that as people practiced a simple memory task, hippocampal theta activity decoded the correct response progressively earlier in time, while hippocampal ripples increased and predicted faster performance. These findings confirm a long-standing but untested prediction of learning theories—that skill acquisition reflects accelerated retrieval from long-term memory—and reveal that even highly practiced, automatic behaviors rely on rapid, ripple-supported hippocampal memory processes rather than mere cortical efficiency or habit formation.
Perspectives
Our study is exciting because it reshapes how we think about learning and expertise: automaticity is not the loss of memory control but a transformation in how quickly the hippocampus retrieves past experiences. The finding that hippocampal ripples accelerate as people become more skilled suggests that even our most effortless behaviors—like reading, driving, or playing music—are supported by rapid, memory-based computations rather than habits alone. This insight opens new directions for understanding how learning changes the temporal dynamics of memory, and it may inspire future research on enhancing expertise, rehabilitation, and brain–computer interfaces by harnessing the timing of hippocampal activity.
Benchi Wang
South China Normal University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Automaticity speeds the retrieval of instances from the human hippocampus, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2518523122.
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