It's not your fault you don't learn from mistakes... your brain is just wired badly

Researchers say study provides 'tantalising insight' into how we learn

Team says it could explain why the ability to learn from mistakes varies so wildly between people

Some people will never learn – and now scientists think they know why. People who keep repeating the same mistakes have less active brains.

The study at Goldsmiths, University of London, is one of the first to try and work out why some people are better at learning from their mistakes than others.

The team studied whether participants were able to listen to feedback and improve their performance on a series of tests.

The researchers analysed electrical brain responses, and identified some people, called high learners, and shown on the left, could learn from mistakes better than others, dubbed low learners

They found that the results varied significantly.



The research, led by Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, examined what it is about the brain that defines someone as a 'good learner' from those who do not learn from their mistakes.



'We are always told how important it is to learn from our errors, our experiences, but is this true?,' he said.

'If so, then why do we all not learn from our experiences in the same way? It seems some people rarely do, even when they were informed of their errors in repeated attempts.

'This study presents a first tantalising insight into how our brain processes the performance feedback and what it does with this information, whether to learn from it or to brush it aside.'

The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, investigated brainwave patterns of 36 healthy human volunteers performing a simple time estimation task.



Researchers asked the participants to estimate a time interval of 1.7 seconds and provided feedback on their errors.



The participants were then measured to see whether they incorporated the feedback to improve their future performances.

'Good learners', who were successful in incorporating the feedback information in adjusting their future performance, presented increased brain responses as fast as 200 milliseconds after the feedback on their performance was presented on a computer screen.

Researchers say that different people learn in very different ways - with 'high learners' far better at learning from their mistakes

This brain response was weaker in the poor learners who did not learn the task well and who showed decreased responses to their performance errors.



The researchers further found that the good learners showed increased communication between brain areas involved with performance monitoring and some motor processes.

Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, one of the research paper's co-authors from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, commented: 'Good learners used the feedback not only to check their past performance, but also to adjust their next performance accordingly.'

The brain responses correlated highly with how well the volunteers learned this simple task over the course of the experiment, and how good they were at maintaining the learned skill without any guiding feedback.