Why does the brain like surprises? Surprise is a basic emotion that refers to a change of humor due to an unforeseen event or stimulus, when the unexpected is not pleasant, triggers a negative emotion, such as fear, anger or sadness.
Instead, when the result is positive, the resulting emotion is pleasurable, triggering intense activation of brain areas, areas involved in other emotions, including pleasure.
So we can say that, one way or another, we have physiological evidence that the brain likes surprises.
The accumbens nucleus, which is part of the central grey nuclei, plays an important role in the treatment of surprise.
Apparently, it activates when faced with an unpredictable situation, especially since the brain unconsciously expects to receive a reward.
As with other emotions, the amygdala also plays an important role in surprise, helping to decide whether the situation is right for us or not. In this region of the brain, there are two groups of neurons:
These two groups are not activated at the same time
As mentioned above, when surprise is unpleasant it acts as a key to the emergence of other emotions, however, when surprise is not harmful, it provides a pleasant feeling, prolonging and making us enjoy this emotion for longer.
Bad surprises often require a quick reaction from us; on the plus side, on the other hand, we can rest peacefully and enjoy.
Numerous researchers have made efforts to find out why this happens and whether it is possible to take advantage of the surprise and apply it to some kind of intervention. In this line of thought, some American scientists have shown that the accumbens nucleus is intensely activated by an unexpected stimulus.
Interestingly, the accumbens nucleus is a fundamental region of the center of brain pleasure, whether the surprise is good or bad, this area will light up by activating, even slightly, the mechanisms of pleasure.
A perfect example is that many people like to enter terrorist homes, where there will be many surprises that, at first, should be negative, as they are followed by negatively charged emotions, such as fear and disgust.
Learning is one of the most studied cognitive processes in psychology and neuroscience. In the last 50 years, factors that influence or produce more sustainable learning have been identified, and surprise is one of them.
According to some authors, the force with which one element is associated with another is getting stronger, until it ceases to amaze. That is, if we present stimulus A with stimulus B (unpredictably) repeatedly, the person will wait for B to present himself very strongly. But once you realize it’s still like this, the reaction becomes much less important.
Thus, scientists have suggested that when a stimulus is surprising, it is more likely to remain in our memory. This relationship between learning, brain and surprise has been most recently demonstrated with neuroimaging tests.
In 2001, a group of British and Australian researchers observed what was going on in the brain during learning if surprise elements were included, and saw the accumbens nucleus become less and less active as the participant became familiar with the presentation of stimuli. , when a surprise event occurred, was intensely reactivated.
It has also been observed in several studies that what we learned around a surprise event stays longer in memory, this can happen because surprise triggers a number of cholinergic and dopaminergic mechanisms that increase attention and motivation.