Learning Mechanism Quotes

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, by reiteration chiefly.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.

All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.

Play is not only our creative drive; it's a fundamental mode of learning.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we're learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

I learn things in a backward way. I learn all those limitations, and slowly my brain soaks them up, and if things go right, you just, in an organic way, translate your ideas into those templates. That's the way I perceive the process happening.

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.