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The Cognitive Science Behind Repeating Mistakes


Stashed in: Brain, Psychology!, WHY, Lessons are repeated until they are learned., Cognitive Bias

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Repeat mistakes help us learn?

It's so hard to not repeat mistakes.

Being constantly late, losing your phone, spending too much money, dating the same inadvisable people—these are all errors that human beings make over and over again. But it has more to do with how the brain is wired than with a lack of discipline. In attempting to understand where we went wrong, our brains create “mistake pathways,” ruts that we get into when we try not to make another misstep. In this short video, staff writer Olga Khazan explains the psychological reasons why it’s so hard not to keep repeating mistakes.

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