Enjoying Uncertainty
There I was having lunch . . . munching away, with one ear on the radio and the other on my wife's stimulating conversation. Suddenly I caught a guy on the radio saying something interesting about risk.
It was BBC Radio 4, talking about potential applications of neuroscience in education. The guy in question was Dr Paul Howard-Jones of the NeuroEducational Research Network. He was talking about motivating children to learn by introducing elements of uncertainty in the reward system. He said that we humans prefer a 50-50 chance of success, rather than something totally unexpected or completely predictable.
I thought it seemed unlikely so I followed up the links on the BBC website and downloaded a paper from the NeuroEducational Research Network. It seems there's quite good evidence for this 50-50 preference, and it's been known for some time. What's new are theories about how it works, backed up by experiments on monkeys that are not for the squeamish.
Our natural attraction to uncertainty explains why games are much more enjoyable when the competitors are closely matched. And this is true whether we are spectators or players. Our desire for uncertainty apparently diminishes when we perceive the activity as educational, or when loss of social status is involved. No doubt there are many other fears that distort our natural risk-taking game-playing nature.
References
NeuroEducational Research Network
The paper: 'Uncertainty and engagement with learning games'
See also my blog posting Pleasures of Uncertainty
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