HARDWIRED FOR NOVELTY

Obsession with the new is ingrained in our brains, whether we like it or not. In a new book, neuroscientist MOSHE BAR explains why.

- MOSHE BAR

Our library of visual experiences helps us to pick out patterns.

Humanbeings are born with an attraction to the new. It seems that advertisers have known this all along. Researchers who study child development have found that even babies show a clear preference for looking at an object that is new to them over one they have seen before.

This early preference for novelty is so strong and reliable that we use it as a way to study recognition in preverbal babies. For example, if we've shown a baby a tomato and then show her a tomato again along with a cucumber, she will look at the cucumber, and this tells us that she recognised the tomato as familiar. Her brain orients her to the novelty. This explains why infants could spend such a long time checking out a paper clip.

SERVING THE FUTURE

Why would we be so attracted to novelty? The answer has to do with the real role of memory in our being. We want to be able to predict what is next, to be optimally prepared for the future, and, to generate those predictions, we lean on memory, approximating the future from our past experience.

That which is new is that which we have not anticipated, so we inspect it and plug our discovery into our memory database to ready ourselves for however we may encounter it again in the future. Being attracted to novelty and swallowing in everything new allows us to expand the set of situations for which we can prepare. This is why attraction to novelty, regardless of whether we like it, which we often do not, is so ingrained in us. Better preparation means better chances of surviving and succeeding.

How do we draw on our past experience for predictions in everyday life? According to our proactive brain framework, when we are in a certain situation, we immediately strive to find an analogy to similar situations from the past.