Researchers have developed a new computational model that explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability and how it can learn very similar tasks without interference between them. To learn new motor skills the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task. However if the brain were too plastic previously learned skills would be lost too easily. The key the neuroscientists at MIT said is that neurons are constantly changing their connections with other neurons. However not all of the changes are functionally
