Blocking Our Brain: How We Can Avoid Repetitive Mistakes!

Persistent mistakes at schools are difficult for teachers, parents, and most of all the children to deal with. Children who keep making the same mistakes tend to be viewed as bad students, but here we propose a different point of view! We think that children often make mistakes not because they do not know the correct answer, but because they fail to block a quicker but wrong answer that seems to make sense. Studies of the brain actually revealed that children, as well as adults, use an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex to inhibit persistent mistakes. Learning to inhibit these mistakes is thus a promising way to help children overcome difficulties at school as well as to help us think more logically as we face problems in everyday life.