Study reveals how, when a synapse strengthens, its neighbors weaken

Here is the paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6395/1349

That's too naive. There's next to nothing known about how activity in individual neurons and their synapses relates to mental contents, in particular "higher level" concepts and thought patterns that you're concerned with in adult learning. In other words, the network dynamics are complex and unknown, and so the suppression / deactivation of certain synapses may just as well be a normal and necessary part of learning as it may be a part of forgetting, or neither. There is currently no contender for a "neuroscience standard model" that would bridge between this kind of neural dynamics and cognitive functions. I hope to live to see one.

Normalization of a layer’s outputs kind of does this already.

I wonder if the progress in artificial neural network technology is going to be correlated to discoveries on real neural networks.