Schematic shows that each eye is presented with a different image, and the participant only perceives the more salient of the two images. During the procedure they are presented with water through a tube, which serves as a reward. On right, we can see that learning (i.e. the difference pretest, in blue, and posttest, in red) occurred for the trained stimulus but not for the same stimulus rotated by 90°. Credit: Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2025.103020

When was the last time you sat down and tried to learn something? How did you approach it? Did you make flashcards for hard-to-remember terms and concepts, ask a friend to quiz you on the subject or simply jump into the deep end with a new project?

New research from Northeastern University psychology professor Aaron Seitz published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology suggests that whenever we learn something new—if we're successful—what we've actually done is tricked our brains into a learnable state. He calls this "incidental learning."

"'Incidental learning' typically refers to what we learn without explicit intention, " Seitz says. A good example of this comes from "statistical regularity" in one's surroundings, he says.

Babies, for example, don't intentionally learn how to speak; it happens as a result of their environment.

"The ability for babies to learn the structure of language and to segment sounds into phonemes, words and sentences is thought to rely upon how we extract statistical regularities of the sounds that we hear and to learn their structures, " Seitz says.

Or think about when an earworm lodges in your brain.

"How often have you learned the lyrics of a song without trying (perhaps 'Baby Shark'?)" Seitz says. "When you think about it, much of what we know is automatically picked up, and in the case of 'Baby Shark, ' whether wanted or not."

Seitz, who is also the co-director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being, says the key shift is understanding that all learning might actually be incidental. Even when we think we're learning on purpose—like studying a new language or cramming for a test—what we're really doing is shaping our environment or mindset in a way that puts the brain into a state where learning can happen.

Because "we often fail in intentional learning, " he writes, "it seems that it is more the case that we trick ourselves into learning than we learn intentionally."

"When we study for a test do we remember the required facts simply because we choose to do so?" he asks. "I suggest the possibility that the underlying mechanisms of incidental learning and intentional learning are the same, and that to learn intentionally, we try to put our brain in a state where incidental learning systems will align with our goals."

These incidental learning systems are "often a set of tricks, " he continues, like "focused attention, repetition, creating rewarding circumstances, etc."

When we fail at intentionally learning systems, he says, it may be because we didn't create the right conditions—employ the right tricks—that would make our own idiosyncratic brain light up. One of these might be pairing learning with a positive outcome or reward.

Seitz provides an example from his own research. "When we do a task that leads to a success (for example, finding a target letter in a sequence of distracting letters), " he writes, "we learn not only to better detect the target letter but we also can learn information that was subliminally presented at the same time."

The question comes down to, then, what do we really have control over? Seitz says that "there are numerous strategies to trick the brain into learning what we want." These include giving the brain additional chances with the material—"we can re-read text or rewatch a lecture"—which increases the statistical regularity of the material in our daily life. They also include changing how we give attention to the material.

"Attention can alter how we process our sensory inputs and shape the 'neural image' of our experience that will be learned, " he says.

And, as in the example of Seitz's experiment above, we can add a layer of positive reinforcement.

As always, however, he notes that "it is important to learn what works for you. We all differ a bit in what leads to more or less effective learning, so it is important to try our different approaches and see what tricks work."

More information: Aaron R. Seitz, Tricking our brains to learn and remember; is all learning incidental? Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2025.103020

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.