How the Human Brain Decides What Is Important and What's Not (neurosciencenews.com)

New submitter baalcat writes: A new study reported by Neuroscience News sheds light on how we learn to pay attention in order to make the most of our life experiences. From the report: "The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy to 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' in an effort to distract her, but a new Princeton University study sheds light on how people learn and make decisions in real-world situations. The findings could eventually contribute to improved teaching and learning and the treatment of mental and addiction disorders in which people's perspectives are dysfunctional or fractured. Participants in the study performed a multidimensional trial-and-error learning task, while researchers scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers found that selective attention is used to determine the value of different options. The results also showed that selective attention shapes what we learn when something unexpected happens. For example, if your pizza is better or worse than expected, you attribute the learning to whatever your attention was focused on and not to features you decided to ignore. Finally, the researchers found that what we learn through this process teaches us what to pay attention to, creating a feedback cycle -- we learn about what we attend to, and we attend to what we learned high values for. 'If we want to understand learning, we can't ignore the fact that learning is almost always done in a multidimensional 'cluttered' environment,' says senior author Yael Niv, an associate professor in psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. 'We want kids to listen to the teacher, but a lot is going on in the classroom -- there is so much to look at inside it and out the window. So, it's important to understand how exactly attention and learning interact and how they shape each other.'" The study has been published in the journal Neuron.

Comments

Raindancing

[umghhh]

I know because I danced and it rained.
Funny that this works for most of SW developers I worked with as well as for huge number of MBA drones too. I suspect MBA drones may be faking it in quest to reach a bonus but they are humans too so most probably randomly arrive at what is the connections between cause and effect.
The worst thing however is that they may be right about choosing the simple way - there is hardly an economic gratification for determining the actual state of reality. For minority there may be a bonus in learning about this study. The majority will be just to distracted to understand and even if they understood this would bring only pain into their lives.

Re:More like advertising

[Opportunist]

What's that "advertising" you talk about? Must be something my brain considered unimportant.

Re:If only that were true

[hey!]

My brain decides to store things I don't care about and refuses to store things I specifically study.

From your perspective that's a bug. From your brain's perspective it's a feature. Your agenda is getting a good mark in your course. Your brain's agenda is to survive, reproduce, and generally have a good time while doing so.

The thing that you think of as "you" is just a tiny film of consciousness on top of an ocean of unconscious activity. You think "you" live in the present, but actually it takes over 300 milliseconds for your consciousness to become aware of anything, and by then, most of the time, your brain has decided what to do about it. "You" mainly come up with rationalizations for decisions your brain has already made. Which is not to say that consciousness isn't important; it isn't quite as sovereign as it believe itself to be.