According to L. Bruening, in Networking with Yourself: How the Brain Uses Information, when a person knows something, the brain has linked it to experience using connections between the synapses of the brain, creating a path between neurons. Th e details included depend on the personal experiences involved.  There are bridges formed, creating an architecture designed to target essentials and quickly move on.  These bridges are built upon when new information is received.

The brain begins with a set of existing information; a collection of previous experiences and facts that are stored and accessed as needed. The collection of information has been viewed as a jungle of intertwining bits of information, but it can also be viewed like the complex road map of a city.  There are tunnels, and alternate routes to get from one place to another in a city road system, even as the brain is capable of finding information via different connections.

When new information is introduced, a bridge between something known must be made for the information to link up to the information system.  Unless a bridge is built between the new information and existing information, the brain will quickly discard the new information.  In essence, the new information sits on a bridge to nowhere. It is especially important in training to link up with prior experiences and build on existing concepts.

It is this linking of experiences with information that cause information to be remembered when something remotely related triggers a connection. Olofactory remembrances of a particular perfume related to a particular event will be triggered and reconnected to the memory of the event if the brain encounters the scent of the perfume another time.

The brain processes much information simultaneously.  The mind is not aware of the details it overlooks. The information that the brain extracts from the circumstances depend on the need for the information.  The mind finds patterns and zooms in on contrast.  It tends to overlook constants in the environment.  Bruening observes this as one of the cognitive pitfalls of learning.

That's why you can drive the same route every day and miss key details someone else hones in on and notice the bakery that's always been there when they add a new sign.

The four cognitive pitfalls she defines are:

1. Reification of Symbols
2. Reification of Structure
3. Motivation of Search
4. Resistance to Revision

Reification is the process of thinking of something artificial or abstract as a real thing.  Reification of symbols is the brain's ability to create the concept of "dogness" built on experience with different dogs.  The concept is a composite of the experiences, but does not represent a particular dog.  Reification is helpful for the brain to classify details, but it also tends to overlook details. The brain sets information into structures, but this also designates what we do and don't see, which is reification of structure.  Structures can be contrasts, continuums, opposites or anything that helps to organize the information. Reification of structure is seeing the structure as reality rather than as one of many possible ways to divide concepts.  Reification of structures created by others may contain inaccurate information, such as the four food groups, which are perpetuated as truth.

All observations have a contextual framework, and an accompanying set of expectations.  Overlooking expectations of the learner assists in the reification process.  Stored experiences determine what should come next, and the brain searches for meaning based on that experience, reinforcing the patterning of the experience.  The Motivation of Search is the brain's ability to look for things that are familiar, and when a match is found, the search is stopped.  Bruening uses an illustrative example of reading a Russian novel, where the names do not create a phonemic match for an English-speaker as opposed to reading an English novel, where there is familiarity of the patterns.  During the reading of the Russian translation, the brain stops at each name because it is unfamiliar.  The brain stops when it finds a close enough match to provide meaning in the English, and moves on much quicker.

That's why typos are so easily overlooked during proofreading! The brain finds "close enough" and moves on as the reality is overridden by the expectations of the reader.

According to Bruening, p 7:
The brain conserves its working space for the most important uses.  Searching for a better match takes a lot of effort, but accepting the first match takes almost none.  "'Motivated search' is the brain's version of automatic pilot: generate expectations; find matching cues; confirm match; trigger next expectation; and so on... But when the incoming stream of inputs fails to match expectations, we quickly shift from 'passive synthesizing to 'active synthesizing.'  Then we hold the inputs in active memory while searching for a better fit.

Active synthesizing is enormously powerful, but it doesn't free us from the limits of expectations.  We can expand expectations, and expand search, but we're still inclined to find information that we search for.  And we're disinclined to find information that we're not searching for,.  Thus, even with our considerable cognitive powers, we're inclined to see information that confirms expectations while overlooking information that strays from expectations.  And since we're not aware of our cognitive search, we're not even aware of this bias."

In adult education, this is especially important, and reinforces the concept of the difficulty in "teaching old dogs new tricks".  It is hard to relearn something that has become ingrained, since the brain easily returns to old patterns.  We literally need to train the brain to think a new way.

This Resistance to Revision aligns with Piaget's theories around schemata and the current thinking about paradigms.  Once something is set in place conceptually, the brain is more likely to seek out things to reinforce the original theory than adapt to newer ones.  In this way, mismatches can occur, so for training purposes, we need to be especially aware of what it takes to create new patterns.  The mind would be very inefficient if it "uprooted and discarded old patterns whenever new ones came along." (p.10)  However, because of this, we need to realize that old bridges are not disconnected, but new information is layered on top of the old.  In this way, the brain gets the benefit of all of the old information as well as the new.  Unfortunately, this also confines us to seeing the new information through the lens of the old information.

Knowledge is built in the brain like the construction of the city road system.  Knowledge is built upon knowledge, and occasionally revamped.  New patterns are added, and are uncomfortable at first, but get worn in until it works naturally. Bruening says, "Any paradigm can seem normal and natural if it's the one you learn first; and any paradigm will seem odd an inconvenient if you've already learned another." p. 12

In training, it is especially important that we understand this concept as we introduce new information that is resisted by the learners. Change is normal, yet we tend to naturally resist it.  We can ease the process by understanding what causes it and what we can do to better align the new information with the old and by building bridges from one side to the other. As trainers, its our job to connect the pieces between the old and the new.

Quoted Article: Breuning, Loretta, "Networking with yourself: How the brain uses information", ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Fall 1990, Vol 47, Issue 3, p 218, 18p