Why does the brain struggle to learn from its mistakes? Here’s how it tries to fix it – time.news

2023-04-22 10:59:45

Of Daniel of Diodorus

You soon learn not to get too close to a fire, but the more complex the situation in which you have to decide, the more you are forced to simplify, exposing yourself to the risk of error

Learn from mistakes? Easy to say, but the brain of humans seems rather oriented towards omissions ea repetition of mistakes. Nothing easier than to keep making bad decisions without triggering alarm signals. Maybe the brain learns quickly and well that it is not the case to get too close to a fire, but what about behavioral choices must juggle numerous biases, the tendency to distort the perception of situations and therefore the rationality of decisions. And the more complex the situation in which one finds himself having to decide, the more the brain is forced to look for some simplification, a defined process heuristic. A way that very easily leads to error.

Evolution

For example, experimental studies have shown that we tend to categorize people according to ethnicity or gender in a fraction of a second, thus giving the immediate start to the prevailing gods prejudices, before a person has even had time to talk to us. A phenomenon that had a protective meaning from an evolutionary point of view, when it was supposed to help to recognize those belonging to other tribes on the fly, but which today is the source of inevitable errors of evaluation. The process supported by
amygdala, the small brain structure is the real control unit of fear, which can only partially be governed by the prefrontal cerebral cortex, where the critical and judgment skills reside. This cognitive phenomenon explored in the book Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury Publishing) by cognitive neuroscientist Pragya Agarwal, to whom the site The Conversation dedicated an article.

Overcoming inherent resistance

The book also clearly shows the existence of another mental bias from which it is almost impossible to escape: the confirmation bias, i.e. the tendency to believe what we are convinced of and instead to resist news and information that conflicts with what we already think we know

. A phenomenon that tends to orient us towards sources of information that we already know and to become suspicious of those that present different points of view.

Research

However, recent research published in the journal Neuron has shown that the brain does everything it can to put some effort into controlling the higher self, in an attempt to keep natural cognitive biases at bay. specific neurons whose job it would be to monitor errors. They are right there in the prefrontal cortex and are embedded in cognitive functions that help initiate new behavioral choices. The authors of the research, led by Zhongzheng Fu, of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say: The results of our study suggest that this coordinated neural activity can serve as a substrate for the analysis of information and allows initiate a performance monitoring system capable of communicating the need for behavioral control to other brain regions, including those that maintain information flexibility, such as the lateral and polar prefrontal cortex.

April 22, 2023 (change April 22, 2023 | 11:41 am)

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