If you didn’t know that there are 86 billion neurons in a human brain, now you do. But does how this complex biological processor work and make learning possible?

Human learning is based on interpreting patterns

Scientists from Penn University point out that the brain’s ability to detect patterns has the goal to present things in a simple way, while maintaining accuracy of representation.

Mistakes that people make while trying to decipher patterns are part of gaining the sense of the big picture.

“If you think about something as basic as attention, there is an inherent trade off in maximizing accuracy versus everything else you are ignoring,” Ari Kahn, one of the authors of the research, pointed out. Apparently, making mistakes and learning from them has a very important role in human cognition.

Just like looking at a painting from close distance shows us more spots of paint than giving the sense of what the work of art is about, stepping out and looking at the big picture is the way how the brain makes sense of patterns and relationships between things. That fuzziness of details makes it easier to interpret the meaning.

Scientists used to believe that human brain worked in a way similar to a computer, but now researchers found it’s not the same.

The research

In the study, participants were presented with a computer screen with 5 squares that were associated with 5 keys on a keyboard. 360 people took part in the study.

Then 2 squares on the screen changed colours and people had to quickly strike the right key on the keyboard. There was a pattern to how the keys would change colours that participants weren’t aware of.

The sequences of colour changes were generated by using either modular or lattice network. What researchers discovered, participants shown the ability to learn the pattern faster if it was generated with the use of a modular network.

If it were a computer, the ability to learn patterns would be the same for sequences generated in either way. For humans, it was different.

As the brain balances complexity vs. accuracy, there is a compromise. Complexity increases the hardness of the task of learning. Lower complexity makes things easier, but then it’s harder to decipher patterns. The compromise between these options was determined in the study by the parameter called beta.

In the group of participants, 10% had high beta values, 20% low values, and 70% of them were in between.

The brain has only a limited amount of resources as well as time, to make simple decisions. Maximizing accuracy takes too much resources that’s not always possible or wise. Thus, mistakes allow to reduce time and efforts on learning. In other words, the ability to make errors allows humans to learn faster.

Or, as the human wisdom holds it, people learn the best from their own mistakes.

Read also:

• There are 100 billion neurons in your brain
• We are brainwashed during sleep
• Sleeping naked improves your health and fertility
• Exercise makes you smarter