Something completely different

Now that I've pissed off everybody I possibly could, what could possibly be more fun than a dip into cognitive science?

Sumarizing a recent experiment:

You take a bunch of monkeys, and teach them a new trick.

You notice that the memory of the new trick is kept in a (new) group of neurons in their brains.

You then observe that even when they get the trick wrong, that is, the monkey displays the wrong behavior, the group of neurons where the trick is kept are still working away.

What does it mean?

It means that even when we do things wrong, like mispell a word, or forget where we put something, we could have got it right.

Why do we get it wrong, over and over again? Is something lost between the part of our brain that knows the answer, and the part that is looking? Is our propensity toward error something that enhances our survivability, or is it simply an artifact of evolution's notoriously poor worksmanship?

It does start to explain the whole "I'll just stop thinking about it and the answer will come to me" phenomenon.

From this experiment, I want to draw two conclusions,
1. Mistakes are good, at least for monkeys.
Just think of all the times you've made a mistake and it turned out for the best. How many times have you discovered something new because you did something wrong?

2. We can avoid making mistakes if we try.
It's in there. The answer, where you put your keys, the right way to connect to your SQL database, whatever, if you ever knew how, you still do, just relax and stop trying.