Author's Introduction
- Confusion is experienced by most of us as a disagreeable feeling and a waste of precious time. But experiencing confusion when encountering a new problem, or a surprising statement, can actually be deeply productive in the context of learning and enhancing brain plasticity. Over the past few years, scientists in educational psychology and neuroscience have started to uncover what Socrates knew all along: that experiencing confusion is often the first step to overcoming our misconceptions and biases, and that it can lead to something more valuable than simply an answer.
Author's Conclusion
- Research in neuroscience is slowly uncovering how confusion works to help us achieve difficult learning goals. Neuroscientists argue that encountering a complicated problem or obstacle in the context of learning a new skill (be it an athletic skill, a language, or how to play a musical instrument) enhances neuroplasticity in our brains, which make us more alert, focused and cognitively active. On subsequent attempts to learn, we’ll have a higher level of focus, and thus a higher probability of succeeding.
- Now, how much confusion is optimal in order to stimulate a deeper processing without pushing us on the edge of discouragement? Where exactly is the sweet spot between a learning task that is overwhelmingly difficult, and one that is too easy and plain boring? An empirical study attempts to answer precisely this question. In ‘The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning’ (2019), Robert Wilson and his colleagues found that the optimal degree of difficulty for stimulating the brain to heighten its focus without leading learners to give up, is a task in which learners get it right about 85 per cent of the time, and err about 15 per cent of the time. If the task is so difficult that for 100 trials we make many more than 15 mistakes, then it is likely to be too hard for our brains to integrate and learn.
- Learning something new and complex inherently involves experiencing confusion and frustration. But the lesson for educators, and for all of us, is that this confusion and this frustration should be embraced and pursued as a mark that our brain is preparing to focus more deeply, to process more thoroughly, so as to give us a better chance at learning something valuable.
- Reframing confusion as a positive and valuable feeling should invite us to rethink some of our daily practices. In our current world in which answers, information and data are readily available at the tip of our fingers, we have little opportunity to exercise our confusion muscle. Or rather, we deprive ourselves of opportunities to enhance our brain plasticity by trying to think of possible answers of our own. Instead of trying to come up with hypotheses for our questions, we tend to simply put our brains on pause while we type in the question in our search engine and wait for the answer to be delivered to us. Next time you are faced with a complicated question, puzzle or surprising information, why don’t you try to follow your confusion where it leads you?
Author Narrative
- Juliette Vazard is a postdoctoral researcher at City University of New York, Graduate Center.
Notes
- Brief but interesting (though hardly surprising).
- I think it's important to distinguish difficult but tractable problems that are within your comfort zone and which you know how to solve from those where you've no idea where to start. But I'd agree that short-cuts to solve the 'easy' problems are now available, and are not good for neural plasticity.
- I wasn't sure how the paper talking about the '85% rule' fitted in (or even what it meant).
- The above paper is available free from Nature here: Wilson, Etc - The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning.
- I need to re-read this paper in the light of the one above just downloaded; when I've read it! Most of it seems to be mathematical, however.
Comment:
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