Friday, 8 March 2013

Learn from Own Mistakes

Do you sometimes wonder why there are people around you that repeating the same mistakes over and over again? Do you sometimes get very frustrated that they never learnt? Do you sometimes vomit blood because you have corrected their mistakes a gazillion times and they still never changed? Well, don't be excited / angry / frustrated. According to Goldsmiths latest research, apparently not everyone learns from their mistakes. It is not their fault. Their brain just cannot function that way.

The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, investigated brainwave patterns of 36 healthy human volunteers performing a simple time estimation task. Researchers asked the participants to estimate a time interval of 1.7 seconds and provided feedback on their errors. The participants were then measured to see whether they incorporated the feedback to improve their future performances.
'Good learners', who were successful in incorporating the feedback information in adjusting their future performance, presented increased brain responses as fast as 200 milliseconds after the feedback on their performance was presented on a computer screen.
This brain response was weaker in the poor learners who did not learn the task well and who showed decreased responses to their performance errors. The researchers further found that the good learners showed increased communication between brain areas involved with performance monitoring and sensorimotor processes.
Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, one of the research paper's co-authors from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, commented: "Good learners used the feedback not only to check their past performance, but also to adjust their next performance accordingly."
The brain responses correlated highly with how well the volunteers learned this simple task over the course of the experiment, and how good they were at maintaining the learned skill without any guiding feedback.
"Though these results are very encouraging in establishing a correlation between brains responses and learning performance, future studies are needed to identify a causal role of these effects," Professor Bhattacharya added.

So, if you are the lucky ones that always learn from your mistakes, thank God or Whoever you believe in, you are designed to excel in life.  

Important note for myself: Don't get angry when others repeat the same mistake. They are not designed to get it. Be gratitude for you are not in the same category, accept the fact, and adjust your method in the future.

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