Learn From The Unexpected

When the world is predictable and everything in it behaves as expected, our attention diminishes because everything happens as we imagine it. There are no surprises. However, when a sudden event occurs that breaks our expectations, we pay as much attention as possible and, in some cases, we can learn from the unexpected.

Thus, it can be said that there is no learning without attention and that attention is easily directed to what surprises us. Surprise is therefore much easier to memorize or at least to capture our attention or interest.

In this article, we’ll look at what it is and how to learn from the unexpected. We will also discover that this ability has been present almost from birth and that it is undoubtedly an alternative to classical conceptions of learning. Some psychologists and educators take these processes into account.

Learning from the unexpected: general concepts

Sometimes science does not progress through the normal course of logic. Interestingly, the exact same thing happens to humans: learning from the unexpected is often much more efficient than learning from a predictable world.

Along these lines, researchers Stahl, A. and Feigenson, L. (2015) published an article in the journal Science in which they describe this phenomenon. Furthermore, they explain that 11-month-olds get bored when the world and objects behave in predictable ways.

The authors noted that babies quickly stopped paying attention to a ball that was moving predictably. However, in a different experimental condition, they focused a lot of attention on a ball that moved in an unusual way, including passing through walls. 

We are born scientists

Somehow, at birth, it seems that we already behave like scientists. In this sense, the babies who participated in the aforementioned study were not limited to learning from the unexpected (as happened with the ball that passed through the walls), but also wanted to interact with those objects of unexpected behavior.

So, just as scientists looking at a fact want to test their hypotheses to experience what happens, babies also behave in a similar way.

For example, when babies saw the ball go through the wall, they would try to catch it. Also, once they had her in their hands, they would squeeze and beat her. Did you check if it was a solid object? Did you interact with the ball?

In another experimental condition, babies saw a ball move and pass through a hole, but without actually falling into it. Anyone expected the ball to fall through the hole, but it didn’t. This was totally unexpected for babies.

In this case, as soon as they had the opportunity, the babies went to the ball and began to try it, throwing it several times on the ground, as if to verify that it obeyed the laws of gravity. Isn’t that amazing?

The mysteries of learning from the unexpected

For science, the mysteries of learning from the unexpected are still far from being explained. Why does it happen? Do we have some kind of innate programming for understanding the laws of physics? This question would generate a heated debate between inatists and environmentalists. Who will be right?

It is quite surprising that babies at this age seem to detect what defies the laws of physics. Not only that: they also tend to explore and try to understand “physically” unexpected events.

Thus, in the researches of the cited authors, the existence of innate laws of physics seems to be demonstrated , since it is extremely unlikely that babies of this age can make logical-causal inferences as if they had advanced reasoning.

Conclusions on the phenomenon of learning from the unexpected

As the above study points out, the main conclusions about the phenomenon of learning from the unexpected can be summarized as follows:

• Babies try to learn more about the new, the unexpected, about what breaks their patterns. Furthermore, they seem to discriminate between what is predictable and what is unexpected.

• In fact, it appears that babies can make predictions about what will happen to an object, so if something they think is going to happen doesn’t happen, they are surprised and explore the phenomenon.
• When predictions about events turn out to be different than expected, babies exploit this dissonance to learn more about the world around them.
• So far, human learning capacity has been underestimated, as the circumstances for this new and different kind of learning already exist in infants.

With all this data, will we still remain anchored in the old paradigms of human learning?