You can probably get close to understanding it by considering other situations in which your awareness and plasticity are firing on all cylinders. When you’re an alert traveler in a new land, you drink in the sights of the foreign country, experiencing more novelty, more learning, and more distributed attention. After all, at home you pay attention

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Reward is a powerful way to rewire the brain, but happily your brain doesn’t require cookies or cash for each modification. More generally, change is tied to anything that is relevant to your goals. If you’re in the far north and need to learn about ice fishing and different types of snow, that’s what your brain will come to encode. In contrast, if

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quivers. Conversely, whenever we need to learn, and learn fast, we can rely on them to optimize our efforts. These pillars are: Attention, which amplifies the information we focus on. Active engagement, an algorithm also called “curiosity,” which encourages our brain to ceaselessly test new hypotheses. Error feedback, which compares our predictions

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