I was reading a blog post at work by an Engineering Manger who was writing about an article in Wired magazine. The title is Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The premise of the story is when we don’t believe the results of some of some action, it may be that the results were accurate, but it was not what was expected.
The article discusses research by Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things — how they fail and succeed. He conducted a number of studies, but the ones I found interesting had to do with using an MRI to see brain activity when people to shown different information.
For example, a group of non-physics majors at Dartmouth were shown two video clips. One was of two different size balls falling at the same rate, and another clip of the larger ball falling at a faster rate. We know from Galileo’s experiment at the Tower of Pisa that the two actually fall at the same rate.
This group of students was first shown the clip of the two balls falling at the same rate. These students were not as astute as we are, and the two balls falling at the same rate was not logical to them. The MRI indicated increased blood flow to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is located near the center of the brain. The ACC is usually associated with the perception of error and is often referred to by neuroscientists as the “oh shit” circuit.
He also showed the same clips to a group of physics majors from Dartmouth. They had a similar reaction in the ACC when they viewed the clip of the ball falling at different rates since they knew the rates should be the same.
Similarly, both groups had activity in another part of the brain when they viewed the clip they felt was the most accurate. This area is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC. This is an area just behind the forehead and is one of the last areas of the brain to develop in young adults. It plays a major role in suppressing so-called unwanted representations, getting rid of those thoughts that don’t square with our preconceptions.
According to the Wired article, “the DLPFC is constantly censoring the world, erasing facts from our experience. If the ACC is the ‘Oh shit!’ circuit, the DLPFC is the Delete key. When the ACC and DLPFC ‘turn on together, people aren’t just noticing that something doesn’t look right,’ Dunbar says. ‘They’re also inhibiting that information.’
So if we perform some action and get the result we expect, we congratulate ourselves for being right. If we don’t get the result we expected, we assume we did something wrong and discard the results, even if they are accurate. Which made me think of the quote by Sherlock Holmes:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This was a very interesting article and I highly recommend it.
