Learn about why we actually learn better from success than failure; why ravens are so smart, they’re making us re-think the way brains work; and why reaching a temperature of absolute zero is absolutely impossible. You Learn Better from Success than Failure by Kelsey Donk Do We Really Learn From Our Mistakes? | Association for Psychological Science — https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/do-we-really-learn-from-our-mistakes.html Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2019). Not Learning From Failure—the Greatest Failure of All. Psychological Science, 30(12), 1733–1744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133 Ravens Can Plan Ahead Just As Well As Apes Can by Ashley Hamer https://curiosity.com/topics/ravens-can-plan-ahead-just-as-well-as-apes-can-curiosity It's Finally Settled: Absolute Zero Is Impossible by Joanie Faletto https://curiosity.com/topics/its-finally-settled-absolute-zero-is-impossible-curiosity Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Learn about why we actually learn better from success than failure; why ravens are so smart, they’re making us re-think the way brains work; and why reaching a temperature of absolute zero is absolutely impossible.
You Learn Better from Success than Failure by Kelsey Donk
Ravens Can Plan Ahead Just As Well As Apes Can by Ashley Hamer
https://curiosity.com/topics/ravens-can-plan-ahead-just-as-well-as-apes-can-curiosity
It's Finally Settled: Absolute Zero Is Impossible by Joanie Faletto
https://curiosity.com/topics/its-finally-settled-absolute-zero-is-impossible-curiosity
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/you-learn-better-from-success-than-failure-ravens-plan-ahead-and-absolute-zero-is-impossible
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why we actually learn better from success than failure; why ravens are so smart, they’re making us re-think the way brains work; and why reaching a temperature of absolute zero is absolutely impossible.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, right? That less-than-positive performance review? A learning experience. The homemade dinner that landed in the garbage can? A good opportunity for growth. But according to new research, that’s not really how our brains work. We actually learn more from our successes than we do from our failures.
Researchers from the University of Chicago recently conducted five experiments where they asked nearly two-thousand people to take some tests. When it came time to “grade” the tests, they told some of the participants which questions they got right. They told other participants which questions they got wrong. When it came time to retake the tests, those who got positive feedback actually scored better.
According to the researchers, people just tune out when they hear about what they’ve done wrong. It’s too overwhelming to hear about our failures, and it doesn’t feel good, so we stop listening. When we stop listening, we can’t learn. And that principle holds true even when feedback on our mistakes is structured to facilitate learning.
According to past research, another reason it’s hard to learn from failure is that we read too far into it. People might assume that a mistake means they’re not committed to the goal, or that they’re just not cut out for it in the first place. That’s especially true if you’re a novice who’s just starting to pursue that goal.
Interestingly, we can learn from the mistakes of others. That suggests that one thing that makes us not learn as well is the threat to our egos. Basically, when our own work isn’t what’s being critiqued, we can hear and learn from the feedback.
So, failure isn’t always what’s best for learning. And that suggests that teachers, coaches, and bosses might want to shift how they give feedback in the future. Praise what goes well instead of critiquing what goes poorly. After all, there are many ways to fail at something, and only a few ways to succeed. Positive reinforcement might feel strange at first, but science says the learning will come.
Have you ever called someone “bird-brained” as an insult? Well you might want to think again. Because birds can be surprisingly smart — especially ravens. Ravens can perform some surprisingly complex tasks AND mimicking human speech. And as if that’s not enough, recent research is showing they can plan ahead. Yes, plan ahead — which is something that’s was once seen as unique to humans and great apes. This research might mean we need to rethink everything we know about bird brains.
For a 2017 study, researchers trained ravens to use a tool to open a puzzle box. Inside that box, there was a food reward. Then, the researchers presented the ravens with the box, but no tool, and left the box in the cage for a while before they took it away. An hour later, they again presented the raven with the tool, along with other random objects. Even though the box was out of sight, nearly every raven chose the correct tool, then successfully opened the puzzle box when it returned 15 minutes later. That is on par with what apes can do, even though ravens don't have a primate's dexterity for tools.
Then, in an experiment that involved bartering and planning, the birds outperformed the apes yet again. Researchers gave ravens a token that they could use to barter for one object from a collection of miscellaneous items, including the box-opening tool and an immediate reward. Overall, ravens preferred the box-opening tool.
It makes sense that primate species perform complex tasks that we used to think were uniquely human. I mean, we shared a common ancestor about seven million years ago, right? But ravens and great apes haven’t shared a common ancestor in more than 300 million years. And that suggests these advanced feats of brainpower evolved separately: as in, once in apes, and once in birds.
It also could mean our understanding of bird brains is just beginning. For instance, we've always believed that in order to recognize yourself in a mirror, your brain needs a neocortex, which is unique to mammal species. But magpies recognize themselves without a neocortex. If birds evolved higher-level thinking independently from our primate ancestors, then judging their smarts from how much their brains look like ours may be misguided. When it comes to avian intelligence, maybe it’s human researchers who are really the “bird-brains.”
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In case you missed the memo, it’s finally been settled: it’s impossible to reach absolute zero. That’s the hypothetical temperature at which all molecular activity is supposed to stop. We’re dealing with some pretty chilly winter weather here in Chicago right now, but it’s pretty balmy compared to absolute zero — which is literally 0 Kelvin. That’s roughly minus-273.15 degrees Celsius. Quite obviously, it would be impossible for us humans to experience that kind of temperature. And after years of controversy, researchers have concluded that zero is impossible. The reason has to do with all the wacky stuff that happens to molecules when chilly temperatures slows them way down.
Lemme back up a bit. The whole absolute zero debate started back in the 1900s. That’s when German chemist Walther Nernst [VAL-ther NERnst] put forward the principle that as a system’s temperature approaches zero, the system’s entropy also goes to zero. Entropy, being the measure of disorder in the system. So low temperature, low disorder. He also argued that absolute zero is actually impossible to achieve. This was because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states we can’t know both the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time. Essentially this means there are always small fluctuations of movement in a particle, so a system’s entropy can’t go down to zero.
This law has been debated for years. But a 2017 study confirmed that reaching 0 Kelvin is physically impossible. Think of it this way: when a system cools off, it’s essentially “shoveling” the heat in it into the surrounding environment, so to speak. But cooling is limited by a couple of factors; namely, how many steps it takes to shovel the heat out, and the size of the surrounding environment. You can only reach absolute zero, then, if you have both infinite steps and an infinite surrounding environment.
The researchers used quantum mechanics to arrive at their conclusion, viewing the cooling process as a computation. They confirmed it’s impossible to cool a system to absolute zero in a finite amount of time, and established a relation between time and the lowest possible temperature, which is the speed of cooling.
This was a longstanding debate about the third law of thermodynamics, but it’s finally been put to bed. And now hopefully you know more than zero about absolute zero.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Joanie Faletto, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!