The emergent mental operation of the learning brain

Abstract

How does the learning brain give rise to emergent mental operations that enable skill internalization and generalization? Using five-year longitudinal tracking of children acquiring abacus-based mental calculation, we reveal how sustained practice progressively reconfigures whole-brain states. Learning induces nonlinear transitions from stable baseline configurations through a transient exploratory phase toward restabilized associative brain networks. This hierarchical remodeling cascades from perceptual systems to action and default networks, mediated by adaptive neural variability and selective connectivity reweighting, with the salience-parietal memory network acting as a dynamic relay. These brain-state transitions accompany an ordered cognitive transfer cascade, emerging within arithmetic and extending to visuospatial and executive functions. Our findings are reproducible and provide a systems-level account of how ecological learning sculpts large-scale networks to enable complex skill acquisition.