The Trick to Outsmarting Advertising

Over the last 20 years, a big trend in psychology has been a focus on how the world helps you learn. A hundred years ago the behaviorists (like B. F. Skinner) assumed that everything was learned, from your knowledge of skills like riding a bicycle to your knowledge about how to use language. By the 1950s, though, psychologists assumed that many things like language were so complex that they probably could not be learned completely from scratch. Instead, linguists like Noam Chomsky suggested that a lot of the mechanisms for using language are built into the brain from birth.

More recently, the pendulum of research has begun to swing back toward learning. The idea is that the brain is able to pick up on information about how frequently you encounter things to learn. Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin and their colleagues have demonstrated that babies learn a lot about the sounds of language that make up words by keeping track of the patterns of sounds that occur in sequence. Tom Landauer and Susan Dumais found that you can learn a lot about what words have similar meanings by using the patterns of words that occur together in the same conversations. Over time, you are much more likely to hear about doctors and nurses being talked about in the same conversation than to hear about doctors and lettuce.

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