Category: Learning

We all crave information, chase it and perhaps consume too much of it — but why?

Information lights up the brain’s pleasure centres, releasing dopamine, just like money or food.

People crave information much like they crave food, whether healthy or junk, because it triggers a similar reward response.

This appetite for information may help explain why people repeatedly check their phones for fresh updates.

The brain releases dopamine in response to information, regardless of whether that information is useful

Dr Ming Hsu, study co-author, said:

“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful.

And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful — what some may call idle curiosity.”

The researchers showed that the brain uses a common scale for information, just as it does for money, Dr Hsu explained:

“We were able to demonstrate for the first time the existence of a common neural code for information and money, which opens the door to a number of exciting questions about how people consume, and sometimes over-consume, information.”

Information is its own reward

For the study, people’s brains were scanned while they played a gambling game.

They were then allowed to pay for information about their odds of winning in each game.

The results showed that people generally overvalued information, especially when larger rewards were at stake.

When people became more curious, they overvalued information even more.

Dr Hsu said:

“Anticipation serves to amplify how good or bad something seems, and the anticipation of a more pleasurable reward makes the information appear even more valuable.”

Brain scans revealed that information activates the same reward-processing regions involved in responses to food, money and drugs, including the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

These reward areas are involved in producing the neurotransmitter dopamine, known popularly as a ‘pleasure chemical’.

Dr Hsu said:

“We can look into the brain and tell how much someone wants a piece of information, and then translate that brain activity into monetary amounts.

The way our brains respond to the anticipation of a pleasurable reward is an important reason why people are susceptible to clickbait.

Just like junk food, this might be a situation where previously adaptive mechanisms get exploited now that we have unprecedented access to novel curiosities.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Kobayashi & Hsu, 2019).

The findings are remarkable because previous studies have suggested that 275 words per minute is the point at which comprehension starts to decline.

Students who watch videos at double speed learn just as much as those watching them at normal speed.

Theoretically, then, it is possible to learn the same amount in half the time.

The study was prompted by the fact that during the pandemic many students were forced to watch online videos rather than attend lectures in person.

Fully 85 percent of students report ‘speed-watching’ these lecture videos.

Despite doubling the speed of the video, though, students show little decline in their learning.

Mr Dillon Murphy, the study’s first author, said:

“Surprisingly, video speed had little effect on both immediate and delayed comprehension until learners exceeded twice the normal speed.”

The findings are remarkable because previous studies have suggested that 275 words per minute is the point at which comprehension starts to decline.

People typically talk at around 150 words a minute, so double speed (300 words per minute) would be beyond this limit.

However, it may be that with practice students have acquired the skill of understanding and retaining speech at higher rates.

Double time

For the study, over 200 UCLA students were split into four groups who watched a 15 minute lecture at different speeds without pausing the video or taking notes:

• Normal speed,
• 1.5 times normal speed,
• double speed,
• and 2.5 times normal speed.

Participants were given comprehension tests immediately and a week later.

The results revealed that the double-speed group scored virtually the same as the normal-speed group, both immediately after the lecture and one week later.

Pushing the playback beyond double speed, however, caused learning and comprehension to drop sharply.

Mr Murphy said:

“College students can save time and learn more efficiently by watching pre-recorded lectures at faster speeds if they use the time saved for additional studying, but they shouldn’t exceed double the normal playback speed.

While our study didn’t reveal significant drawbacks to watching lecture videos at up to double the normal speed, we caution against using this strategy to simply save time.

Students can enhance learning if they spend the time saved on activities such as reviewing flashcards or taking practice tests.”

Complex or difficult material

The researchers also experimented with various combinations of re-watching the lectures at different playback rates.

The most interesting of these combinations was when the lecture was speed-watched twice one week apart, which led to better retention than if the lecture had been watched once at normal speed.

However, listening at double speed may not be effective with more complex or difficult material.

In this study, students watched lectures on the Roman Empire and real estate appraisals.

If the subjects had been thermodynamics or immunology, the results may have been different.

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The study was published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology (Murphy et al., 2022).

Scientists watched memories physically forming in the brain.

Learning can change the physical structure of the brain within hours.

The finding is remarkable because neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to reorganise itself — was thought to be a much slower process.

Brain scans have now revealed that areas of the parietal cortex can change within hours.

The findings also suggest that memories are stored locally, rather than in ‘memory banks’.

The study involved people being given a type of brain scan called diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI).

This technique measures how water molecules are arranged in the body.

The neuroscientists used this tool to see how water moved in the brain as people learned new things.

The study’s authors conclude:

“We detected neocortical plasticity as early as 1 hour after
learning and found that it was learning specific, enabled correct recall, and overlapped with memory-related functional activity.

These microstructural changes persisted over 12 hours.

Our results suggest that new traces can be rapidly encoded into the parietal cortex, challenging views of a slow-learning neocortex.”

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The study was published in the journal Science (Brodt et al., 2018).

An extra 20 minutes can really help you properly absorb new information.

Overlearning could be the key to locking in new information.

The conclusions comes from a study in which people continued to learn a task 20 minutes after they had already mastered it.

The extra 20 minutes were vital to locking in those performance gains.

Continuing to practice — even after you have stopped improving — protects the learning.

Professor Takeo Watanabe, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These results suggest that just a short period of overlearning drastically changes a post-training plastic and unstable [learning state] to a hyperstabilized state that is resilient against, and even disrupts, new learning.”

Usually, new learning can be disrupted by any subsequent learning, studies show.

For effective learning, the study’s authors recommend these three points:

1. Overlearning cements training quickly. However, be aware that overlearning one subject can interfere with similar learning that follows.
2. Don’t try to to learn anything afterwards. If you don’t overlearn something, it can interfere with what you have just learned.
3. Two tasks can be learned without interference as long as there is a few hours between them.

In the research 183 people were presented with a series of images for learning.

Those that overlearned — they carried on learning after mastery — laid down stronger memories than those who did not overlearn.

Those who did not overlearn were likely to see memory interference from a subsequent task.

However, if there was a gap of a few hours in between bouts of learning, one task did not then degrade the performance on the other.

Professor Watanabe concluded:

“If you want to learn something very important, maybe overlearning is a good way.

If you do overlearning, you may be able to increase the chance that what you learn will not be gone.”

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The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Shibata et al., 2017).