Why Don’t I Learn From My Mistakes (am I just stupid?)
I’ve made millons of mistakes in my life.
I’ve learned from just a few of them.
This puzzled me. Why is it that — as a reasonably intelligent individual with a stable lifestyle and upbringing, apart from that one time — I still fail to learn from the mistakes I make?
Being Player One, with a mission to win this game, I decided to investigate a little further.
My brain is lazy (and misguided)
Turns out it’s too much effort for me.
The cognitive effort it requires for me to change my thinking and then my actions is often too much. My brain is wired (often) to take the easy way out. Rather than make an effort to change, to learn and to grow, it opts for the cinch, the thing it is used to.
There is research behind this recognition of my truly lazy behaviour.
Critically, most participants developed a bias against frequent task-switching, revealing that they preferred to avoid this cognitive-control operation
In that study, participants were asked to make decisions, and the decisions and actions that actually took a bit of work were ditched.
Humans just don’t like hard work, even when we’re thinking.
Of course, some of us are working on rewiring our brains. We’re making that cognitive effort.
It’s simply hard work though, to learn from our mistakes. Our brains can be slackers too.
On top of my brain being a slacker, there’s something called frequency bias. I’m no expert (yet) but I understand this. This phenomenon occurs when our brain looks at the frequency of an outcome and sees that it has happened a lot. It then simply makes the same cognitive choices again and again.
Our brain assumes we are doing things right, even when we are not, because we have done it that way so many times.
So what can I do about it?
I’m working on rewiring aspects of my brain. This a process where I am stepping back from a situation when I can, looking at how I think about things, reflecting.
That reflection, the more I do it, should allow me to analyse mistakes more, and build that cognitive muscle.
Then, I feel that if I’m able to get objective, I should be able to start training my brain a little. If I find myself in a similar situation to one where I have made a mistake, I should be able to step back, use memory, and then make a ‘cognitive leap’ towards a different outcome.
That should start work on my lazy brain.
With the frequency bias, it’s again about ‘pattern interrupt’. By reflecting and finding myself facing the same mistake again, I should be able to stop my brain in its tracks, and reduce the er…frequency of frequency bias.
Wish me luck. I’ll continue to look at why we don’t learn from our mistakes in the weeks ahead.
If you like my stuff, buy me a coffee. Americano, milk.
