Refuse to learn from experience? Thank your genes

It has always astounded me how people can believe things that are directly contrary to their own experience.

Of course, our experience is sometimes misleading. Eg., we don't see the roundness of the earth, unless we go to a high altitude.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=refuse-to-learn-from-experience-tha-2011-04-19

By Katherine Harmon | Apr 19, 2011 07:15 PM

Some people are incurable contrarians or imperturbable logicians. But most of us, whether we like it or not, allow other people's opinions and advice to color our own experiences and opinions. Have you found that restaurant to really be as good as people say it is?

New findings suggests that a person's willingness to coolly consider the facts gleaned from their own experience—apart from others' previous verbal suggestions—might be based in large part on genetics.

It has been known and frequently demonstrated that "people will distort what they experience to be perceived as more consistent with what they thought already," Michael Frank, of the Brown Institute for Brain Science at Brown University, and a collaborator in the new research, said in a prepared statement. Even researchers can fall prey to confirmation bias, thinking they have discovered what they actually had expected to find in the noise of data.

So, why do we often struggle to accept our own impressions if they contradict what we've been told to expect? The disconnect occurs in part because these two types of information, the abstract and the experiential, are processed in different parts of the brain. Advice ("go to that Italian restaurant") is filtered, along with other higher-level cognition, in the prefrontal cortex. Experience ("that Italian restaurant is usually mediocre"), on the other hand, is lodged in a more primitive region of the brain, the striatum.

Although perhaps we should be more inclined to stick with what our gut (or tastebuds) has learned from personal experience, most people tend to lean on what their prefrontal cortex—i.e. outside instruction—has to say for more time than they rationally should.

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Of course, it's certainly easier—and less painful—to learn to avoid a hot plate by being told to do so, and we've likely evolved to take this into account, prizing the prefrontal cortex's retained instructions. "This phenomenon of confirmation bias might actually just be a byproduct of a system that tries to be more efficient with the learning process," Frank said.

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