The ancients believed that it is common for a person to make mistakes. And this is normal. Moreover, neurobiologist Hanning Bek is convinced: it is worth abandoning perfectionism and allowing himself to make mistakes where new solutions need to be found, develop and create.

Who would not want to have the perfect brain? Working without complaints, effectively and accurately – even when the bets are high and the pressure is huge. Well, just like the most accurate supercomputer! Unfortunately, the human brain does not work so perfectly at all. Make mistakes – the basic principle of the work of our mind.

Biochemist, neurobiologist Hanning Beck writes: “How easily the brain is mistaken? Ask the guy from one largest trading Internet site, who two years ago tried to activate the service mode for servers. He made a small typo on the command line to activate the service protocol. And as a result, large parts of the servers failed, and losses grew to

hundreds of millions of dollars. Just because of a typo. And no matter how hard we try, such errors will ultimately repeat. Because the brain cannot afford to get rid of them “.

If we always avoid mistakes and risk, we will miss the opportunity to act boldly and achieve new results

Many people think that the brain works in a logically structured way: from point A should be to point B. Thus, if at the end there is a gross mistake, we just need to analyze what went wrong in the previous stages. In the end, everything is happening has its own causes. But this is not the point – at least at first glance.

In fact, the areas of the brain that control actions and give rise to new thoughts work chaotic. Beck gives an analogy – they compete as sellers in the farmer market. The competition occurs between different options living in the brain by patterns of action. Some are useful and correct;others are completely unnecessary or erroneous.

“If you were in the farmer market, you noticed that sometimes the seller’s advertising is more important than the quality of the product. Thus, the most “loud”, and not the best products can become more successful. Such things can happen in the brain: the model of action for any reason becomes so dominant that it suppresses all other options, ”Bek develops the thought.

The “Farmer Market Region” in our head, where all options are compared, are basal ganglia. Sometimes one of the patterns becomes so strong that the others overshadow. So “loud”, but the wrong scenario dominates, the filter-mechanism passes in the anterior waist cortex and leads to an error.

Why is this happening? There may be many reasons. Sometimes it is pure statistics, leading to an obvious but incorrect dominance scheme. “You yourself came across this when you tried to quickly pronounce a tongue twister. Incorrect samples of speech prevail over the right ones in your basal ganglia because they are easier to pronounce, ”says Dr. Beck.

Here’s how the tongue twisters work and how our thinking style is fundamentally tuned: instead of planning everything perfectly, the brain will determine the gross goal, develop many different options for action and try to filter the best. Sometimes it works, sometimes a mistake skipped. But in any case, the brain leaves the door open to adaptation and creativity.

If we analyze what is happening in the brain when we make a mistake, we can understand: in this process many areas are involved – basal ganglia, frontal bark, motor cortex and so on. But one region is absent in this list: the one that controls the fear. Because we have no inherited fear to make a mistake.

No child is afraid to start talking due to the fact that it can say something wrong. When we grow, we are taught that errors are bad, and in many cases it is a reasonable approach. But if we always try to avoid mistakes and risk, we will miss the opportunity to act boldly and achieve new results.