The Physiological Reasons Proving Why It’s Often Difficult to Learn From One’s Mistakes

Olga Khazan, staff writer for The Atlantic, reported on the fascinating proof that learning from one’s mistakes is sometimes easier said than done. When errors are made, the human brain develops specific pathways in concert with these errors, making it very difficult to behave differently when faced with the same situation. Slowing down doesn’t seem to help either, because the brain is still trying to resolve what went wrong.

We’ve all heard the advice that we should just slow down after we make a mistake and it’s true that the decision-making process in the brain does slow down a little bit after we’ve made the wrong choice but it turns out that this phenomenon ‘post error slowing” isn’t as helpful as you might think. the problem is your brain wastes so much time trying to figure out ‘what happened?’, ‘did something about the world change?’ ‘is there something wrong with me?’. it distracts you from finding the right answer.