How the Brain Decides What’s Important and What’s Not

A new study sheds light on how the brain helps us to learn and make decisions in the real world.

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 researchers studied how we learn what to pay attention to in order to learn more effectively — that is, to make the most of life experiences — assuming that in real-life situations most of what is going on is irrelevant and shouldn’t be learn about.

“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.”

Source: How the Brain Decides What’s Important and What’s Not

Originally published at Cogly.