Why do we dumb things down? | Marvin Liyanage

If you walk into a room with a baby, you will automatically change how you speak. Why do we do that? It turns out that people, including babies, learn best when we are challenged, but not overwhelmed. We intuitively know that, so we meet people where they’re at. But if we can understand what’s happening in our brain when we’re challenged with new information, we can maximize learning gains and avoid burnout.

In neuroscience, this experience where we struggle productively, just on the edge of what we can do based on our current competency, is called “optimal challenge”. When you are meeting “optimal challenge” your brain makes predictions about the world based on all of the data you’ve collected from experience and updates its model when its predictions are wrong.

Imagine a dad sitting down in a friend’s apartment, holding his baby. A soft “meow” comes from the doorway and the dads ears perk up. His brain knows that the meow means a cat is about to come through the door. The baby, in a new environment, is primed for learning. When it sees a furry animal enter the room she makes her best guess: she points and says “doggy”. Dad corrects her and says “That’s a cat. Can you say cat?”

This magical moment is core to how we update our internal models of the world — a prediction error that’s exciting enough to evoke curiosity but not threatening enough to evoke anxiety. The feedback from dad and the image of the furry animal get wired together in a new neural pattern that will come to life when the baby hears the word “cat”.

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