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When you are supposed to study in the dorm or work overtime at home, you are well versed in the art of fishing. Why do you have to go to the library or cafe to start the focus mode and increase the efficiency of your study? Excluding all kinds of factors that are forced to focus, in fact, the brain is biased towards new and strange scenes, so it is easier to turn on the switch of learning mode.

Looking back on the past, you may find that it is not all the important events that have impressed you in your life, and some of them may even make you confused: why do I still remember it when it is obviously unimportant? In fact, if you summarize these seemingly meaningless memories, you will find that a considerable number of them are accompanied by "surprises", that is, accidents that violate expectations.

And our cognitive function is based on the memory of external information. Therefore, strangeness will prompt the brain to turn on the switch of learning mode, or "surprise" can improve learning efficiency. This statement seems strange at first glance, but it makes sense to think about it carefully. Just like being in a familiar environment, the sudden emergence of something new always attracts all our attention, this is the performance of the brain urgently opening up the learning mode. It is like an alert guardian, once it finds a strange environment, unexpected events, it is always ready to capture new knowledge to arm itself.

In the brain factory, the head of memory is the hippocampus (hippocampus, both humans and mammals have two, located in the left and right hemispheres of the brain). Previous studies have found that the memory functions of the hippocampus are mainly memory coding and memory retrieval. The former is called memory coding because when the brain encounters knowledge that needs to be remembered, it does not store the information directly in its original form, but encodes it based on the understanding and cognition of the information. only then can the information be perceived in the form of synaptic connections between neurons. On the other hand, memory retrieval needs to extract the stored memory, which can be understood as the location and access of information.

A schematic diagram of the hippocampus in the right hemisphere. Photo Source: Pixabay

However, due to the limited resources of the brain, or in order to improve the efficiency of information processing, there is a conflict between memory coding and retrieval mechanisms. Therefore, the hippocampus has to switch adaptively between coding and retrieval state, which depends on whether we are currently learning new knowledge, or need to review or retrieve memory.

Dr Dariya Frank, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Manchester (University of Manchester) in the UK, has been studying cognitive learning patterns in the brain. Her previous research has suggested that unintended events before or during learning trigger adaptive coding mechanisms in the hippocampus, thus greatly improving memory for unexpected events.

However, the relevant theoretical research has not been confirmed by experiments, and it is not clear whether accidents will trigger similar adaptive mechanisms in the process of information retrieval. To that end, Frank and her team designed an experiment, the results of which were recently published in the journal The Journal of Neuroscience.

Surprise's experimental researchers first showed 50 volunteers pictures of many objects, such as natural fruits, trees, flowers, or man-made airplanes and mice. Volunteers need to judge the types of items in the first round. In the second round, the researchers showed the pictures to the volunteers again, while providing square and triangular clues before giving the pattern.

The main purpose of the first two rounds of experiments was to train volunteers to associate natural objects with square patterns and artificial objects with triangular patterns. This is equivalent to setting psychological expectations for volunteers: in theory, as soon as they see a square clue, they can identify the corresponding object picture through the memory retrieval function, similar to the triangle.

But in the third round, the volunteers were divided into two groups. The researchers mixed several other new pictures into each of the old pictures shown to the volunteers, and then showed them to the volunteers with corresponding clues. In other words, volunteers need to combine clues (expected events) to identify the target images seen in the previous two rounds from these images, in order to test the information retrieval ability.

In a group of volunteers, the researchers still followed the rules of square-natural and triangle-artificial. But in another group of volunteers, 30% of the "surprises" were set: wrong clues were provided, such as giving natural pictures after providing triangular clues, which broke the volunteers' expectations. In the process, volunteers were asked to identify which pictures were "old pictures" that appeared in the first two rounds and which were "new pictures" that appeared only in the third round.

According to the comparison of the results of the two groups of volunteers, the researchers found that when they encounter a "surprise" event in the process of information retrieval, it will affect the volunteers' results of image recognition-they are less good at finding "old pictures". This shows that the unexpected event that violates the expectation will indeed trigger the information coding mechanism and seize the resources of the hippocampal information retrieval function.

"surprise" events will improve the ability to encode information about current events, but at the same time sacrifice the ability to identify retrieved information. But interestingly, the brain's ability to remember expected events after the "surprise" improved. In other words, after an accident, volunteers will identify the target picture more easily than before when they encounter a corresponding picture that matches the expected clue. This means that in the short term, unexpected events can damage our ability to retrieve the memory of the current task, but in the long run, unexpected events may be good for memory.

When a violation occurs, the participants' hippocampal (red) and midbrain (orange) regions are activated. (photo source: original paper)

At the same time, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to monitor brain activity in real time during the experiment. The images showed that volunteers who experienced unexpected events activated the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory function, and the midbrain, which releases dopamine. This suggests that the activation of hippocampal-mesencephalon is a sign of accidental event-triggered memory coding state, and the switching of different states of hippocampus is likely to be regulated by dopamine input.

Generally speaking, unexpected events that violate expectations not only improve the memory of unexpected events themselves, but also improve the memory performance of subsequent expected events at the expense of retrieval function. The improvement of the former is easy to understand, but why is it also helpful for subsequent memory? The researchers proposed two possible explanations for this. One of them is that the coding process triggered in violation of expectations is likely to optimize the subsequent retrieval of expected events. Because its coding represents the retrieval of current expected events, it can also be compared with previous unexpected events, so as to provide information and guidance for current recognition decisions and improve memory performance as a whole.

The Magic Cafe goes back to the original question: why is it more efficient to study and work in a library or cafe? One of the most important mechanisms has been discussed in this paper. strangeness causes the hippocampus to turn on the memory coding function and switch the brain to learning mode. Compared with the library, a suitable cafe may be particularly effective in improving the efficiency of study and work.

As opposed to familiar and comfortable scenes at home, moderately noisy white noise, the seductive aroma of coffee in the air, dim lights, and even the whispers of people around us, all of these provide us with a vivid and fresh audio-visual experience, constantly tapping our potential and promoting the brain to improve learning efficiency.

Photo Source: Unsplash

Another reason may be related to social facilitation effect (social facilitation effect), which involves two concepts: audience effect and co-effect. Over the past hundred years, we have had a deep understanding of the audience effect-perceiving the presence of a small number of audiences can enhance our internal drive and thus improve our productivity. The co-effect is that when someone competes with us, it triggers our awareness of the uncertainty of the outcome, so we will work harder.

Seeing that the people around you are studying attentively, it is easier for them to put aside their thoughts and study carefully. This experience should be no stranger to students who often go to the library for self-study. But the situation in cafes is more complicated because not everyone comes for work, and some people simply relax or chat. In such a chaotic crowd, how on earth do those who work improve their efficiency? According to a 2016 study published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, mental work seems to be contagious, meaning that just sitting with hard-working people is enough to make us more productive. Although the contagion mechanism of mental work is not clear, it is sincerely recommended that if you need strangeness (and perhaps caffeine) to start the learning mode, choose a cafe with a small social crowd and a work-intensive population.

Tips: when we encounter unexpected events when retrieving information, such as reviewing in an unfamiliar environment, our brains choose to switch to memory coding mode, which may enhance our memory for future exams. Conversely, when we try to recall what we have learned during the exam, a familiar environment may also be helpful because the brain is more inclined to retrieve patterns.

But compared to the probability of being able to take an exam in a familiar environment... Let's choose the former.

Reference link:

Https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/33/6435

Https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-potential-tune-brain-mode.html

Https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.15.422817v1.full

Https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/17/3455

Https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224540109600546?journalCode=vsoc20

Https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00601/full

Https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26265430/

Https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048?seq=1&version=meter+at+2&module=meter-Links&pgtype=Blogs&mediaId=%25%25ADID%25%25&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click#metadata_info_tab_contents

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue), written by: bad week, revision: 27, clefable

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