{"id":218173,"date":"2025-07-17T18:08:58","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T23:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/is-all-learning-incidental-psychologist-says-that-we-trick-our-brains-into-learning"},"modified":"2025-07-17T18:08:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T23:08:58","slug":"is-all-learning-incidental-psychologist-says-that-we-trick-our-brains-into-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/is-all-learning-incidental-psychologist-says-that-we-trick-our-brains-into-learning","title":{"rendered":"Is all learning \u2018incidental?\u2019 Psychologist says that we \u2018trick\u2019 our brains into learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/is-all-learning-incidental-psychologist-says-that-we-trick-our-brains-into-learning2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When was the last time you sat down and tried to learn something? How did you approach it? Did you make flashcards for hard-to-remember terms and concepts, ask a friend to quiz you on the subject or simply jump into the deep end with a new project?<\/p>\n<p>New research from Northeastern University psychology professor Aaron Seitz <a href=\"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S0959438825000510\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Current Opinion in Neurobiology<\/i> suggests that whenever we learn something new\u2014if we\u2019re successful\u2014what we\u2019ve actually done is tricked our brains into a learnable state. He calls this \u201cincidental learning.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018Incidental learning\u2019 typically refers to what we learn without explicit intention,\u201d Seitz says. A good example of this comes from \u201cstatistical regularity\u201d in one\u2019s surroundings, he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When was the last time you sat down and tried to learn something? How did you approach it? Did you make flashcards for hard-to-remember terms and concepts, ask a friend to quiz you on the subject or simply jump into the deep end with a new project? New research from Northeastern University psychology professor Aaron [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}