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

Re:conflicting theories?

[goose-incarnated]

but a lot is going on in the classroom -- there is so much to look at inside it and out the window.

This is a little worrying, since we are told that a rich classroom environment stimulates the young mind. It almost sounds as if we should go back to the drab, austere, classrooms of past decades. That way the children will have few distractions and will be better able to pay attention to their teacher.

We've always known that distractions are the enemy of learning. The problem is that the most vocal proponents of any idea are themselves vacuous and unable to focus, hence they suggest stupid things like distracting environments and (being the most vocal) manage to get their way.

I recall a study that found that a touch of OCD contributed immensely to problem solving skills. This is because having just enough OCD to turn things over and over in your head (for days, if need be) allows the person to view all facets of a problem. Being easily distracted means that only superficial thought is put into a problem.

Solitude is necessary for depth when thinking.