Why the brain is wired to learn with surprise

Memories of my school days are of teachers droning on. We now know that stimulus is important, but it is not only stimulus that counts. The research shows that surprise is an important element to learning – so much so in fact that some people claim that surprise minimisation is one of the most essential features of human learning. Read on…

What a surprise, surprise is good for learning! What you may find surprising, however, is how early this starts. Pre-verbal toddlers pay closer attention to novelty and notice surprising events. In these toddlers, attention and eye contact is the measure of their interest. They will stare at new objects and when this does not change, they will look at something else. But present a new object and this captures their attention. So, by measuring how long they look at something we can also gauge their interest levels, or levels of novelty and surprise.

This has been researched into babies of all ages and has thrown up a lot of fascinating insights into human nature and how much is truly hard-wired vs. learned. If babies engage in a behaviour we know there is a large "hard-wired" component to this. However, we also know that babies come with some sort of learning into this world. They, for example, know the rhythm of their mother tongue which they have been able to hear in their womb, the voice of their mother, and have also had indirect exposure to certain foods.

But let’s get back to surprise – old-school methods were just get the kids to remember things and punish them if they didn’t - very old school, I know. Later excitement and engagement moved into teaching as pedagogy research flourished and grew.