By Nicolle Charbonneau, HealthSCOUT Reporter

THURSDAY, Oct. 5 (HealthSCOUT) -- Why are some things easier to learn than others?

A Rutgers University psychologist believes it stems from the way our brains learn -- the precise form of logic we employ.

And knowing that, he says, not only answers questions about the human brain but someday should help us program computers to process more complex concepts.

"If you really want to know how people learn, you really have to know what makes some concepts harder than other concepts to learn," says brain and cognitive psychologist Jacob Feldman. "The question is, what's the difference between those two cases?"

To figure out that difference, Feldman explored what's known as "concept learning," or learning from examples. Concept learning demands that the brain generalize about different objects based on their characteristics and find out what they have in common.

If you're shown a red apple and a red book and asked what you're looking at, for instance, you might say "red things."

Feldman believes the brain uses Boolean logic, a mathematical process of linking topics in order to expand or narrow a search. If you're familiar with Internet searches, you probably know what Boolean algebra is, even if you don't recognize the word. A search engine that uses "and," "or" or "not" is using the Boolean system to rule out certain associations and include others.

He showed 215 volunteers an image of an amoeba-like shape for several seconds, then had them pick it out from a series of images, with all but one differing slightly from the original. The more complex the original image, meaning the more categories that the viewers would use to describe it, the more difficult it was to learn, he says.

"My paper proposes a pretty simple idea," says Feldman, who admits surprise that no one had discovered it before. "If you write down the concept that people are trying to learn in [Boolean] terms, and then simply try to come up with the simplest logical way of expressing the same idea…the length of that shortest expression -- the Boolean complexity -- is a good prediction of how difficult human subjects will find [it is] to learn such a concept."

In simpler terms: "Red and book" is easier to learn than "red and book and paperback." Essentially, concepts are easier to learn, he believes, if their Boolean complexity is short. Results of the study appear in today's issue of Nature.

Although the study was not designed to find out whether this skill is hardwired into the brain or whether we learn it as we age, Feldman speculates that it's innate.

"I would imagine that [children] are doing some kind of simplification from the word 'go,' " he says.

British psychology professor Nick Chater says Feldman's concept "connects with this very general idea that the brain is searching for simple patterns."

"The brain finds things easy or difficult to learn depending on how complex they are, and where complexity can be measured in a really simple way --in terms of the amount of description that it takes to characterize something," says Chater, a professor at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

Understanding more about how the human brain works could lead to advances in programming computers so they learn from experience, Feldman says.

"The idea is, you'd give the computer a sequences of examples and try to get it to extract the patterns -- for instance, for weather forecasting or to try to forecast the stock market," he says.

What To Do

If you want to know more about the basics of Boolean logic, check out How Stuff Works or NewsBank.

Or, you might want to read previous HealthSCOUT articles on how we learn. One describes how children learn a sophisticated spelling rule on their own, another details how our brains screen out "noise," and a third describes how we form habits.

(From HealthSCOUT)