The One Thing Our Brains Rely on to Generate New Ideas

Humanity’s evolutionary superpower is our behavioral flexibility. As we go through life, we learn how to navigate the world, building a store of knowledge, habits, and policies that have served us well in the situations we’ve encountered. But there will always be new scenarios that may require new solutions—something we’ve never done before or even thought of doing before. Such scenarios require “thinking outside of the box,” and when we need to do that, we draw on an unlikely resource: a little bit of randomness in the brain circuits that offer up options for action. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] We have the cognitive capacity to adapt to complex, unpredictable scenarios across all kinds of new environments. But that flexibility—the almost infinite range of behaviors open to us at any moment—creates a problem. How do we narrow down the options and choose the best one? It’s no use considering literally every possible thing we could do in every situation we encounter—we’d never finish trying to decide. What we need to do is narrow down the search space: come up with a few decent options and evaluate them for the best one. That is exactly what learning enables us to do. As we grow and explore the world, we gradually accumulate knowledge and build up a model of how the world works. We learn about the properties and relations of objects in the world—especially what we can do with them...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news