That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Confusion

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind how you get confused, and why sometimes thats good. 

Hi, my name is Oloff Krig Olson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Well, we're back. We took a couple of weeks off as we said we would, but we're back. So let's dive right into it. Imagine you're driving somewhere. You've driven a hundred times before.

You know the route. You know the turns. You know exactly where the lights are. Your brain is basically on autopilot. And then suddenly, you turn the corner and the road is closed. You slow down. You hesitate. And for a moment, your brain goes, wait, what do I do now?

That feeling right there, that brief pause where your brain has to stop and reconsider, is confusion. Most people think confusion is a bad thing. They think it means they're not understanding something. But neuroscience suggests something very different. Confusion is actually one of the most important signals the brain produces. It means your brain expected one thing. Reality delivered something different. That gap between expectation and reality.

is where learning begins. Confusion is not a failure of thinking. It's the starting point of thinking. So you've never guessed it, but on today's episode, the neuroscience of confusion. So what is confusion in the brain? At the brain level, confusion happens when your predictions fail. Your brain is constantly predicting what will happen next. And these predictions come from multiple regions of the brain. There's our old friend, the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is making predictions about planning and the expectations that go with those plans. So when planning fails or an expectation isn't delivered, there's confusion. The anterior cingulate cortex, a mid-brain structure we've talked about before, it's involved in learning and also

conflict monitoring. And in both of those situations, there can be confusion. If you go to learn something and you find out the answer isn't what you thought it would be, confusion. In a situation that you thought would be calm and easy and straightforward, and all of a sudden there's conflict, things aren't what you expect, confusion. And even the midbrain structures that we've talked about before, the basal ganglia and the mid-brain dopamine system, well, they learn from errors, but as you'll see, errors can be thought of as a source of confusion. So what happens when something unexpected happens?

All right, the brain produces a prediction error. Now, we've talked about prediction errors before, but today I'm going to frame them differently, but basically a prediction error is when the current situation doesn't match what you expected to happen. You know, you went to a movie that you thought was going to be really good and it wasn't. Prediction error. You thought you were going to get paid and you don't prediction error. Or like my example I used at the top of the podcast, you turn a corner on your route home and the road is closed.

Prediction error. What's cool like this is you can. can measure this with electroencephalography. This is something we actually do in my lab. So imagine we put a bunch of electrodes on your head. We do this in my research lab every day. And what happens when you see these prediction errors? You get something called the N200. Some people call it the reward positivity. But these signals appear about two to 300 milliseconds after the brain detects something unexpected. Your brain is slowly saying, hold on, we've got to update the worldview. It's a prediction error. And as I've told you in the past with learning, these signals drive learning.

And that's important, but you have to think about it as confusion. And I'm going to come back to the negative side of confusion a bit. But let's just talk and roll with this positive side. So confusion activates the systems in your brain that are responsible. for cognitive control. That's the prefrontal cortex and for learning. That's the midbrain structures, the dopamine system and the anterior cingulate cortex. So what happens when you're confused? Your brain zones in. You get more attentional focus. Your brain's working memory system is working overtime, no pun intended, and you're updating your beliefs about the world. In fact, if you don't have confusion, learning slows down dramatically.

If things are always the way you expect, you're not truly learning. You're just reviewing what you already know. So when everything matches your expectations, the brain doesn't update anything. But when things don't match your expectations, the brain says, hang on, we need to update our view of the world, and that's confusion. So when confusion happens, you've got the dopamine system firing, the anterior cingulate cortex is working to resolve things. The prefrontal cortex is engaging to direct traffic in a sense.

So a simple way to put this is that confusion tells the brain it's time to think harder. This is why good teachers, I'm going to give you an education example, intentionally create what's called productive confusion. And if you're a teacher out there, listen carefully because productive confusion is awesome. Imagine the following things in the classroom, and hopefully you've all experienced them. A challenging question, a question that really stumps your students, creates confusion, challenging their beliefs, challenging what they know. A surprising demonstration. when I was a high school science teacher, I had this experiment I did called the egg drop.

It's a bit hard to visualize, but I'm going to try it. So what I did is I took three jars that are three quarters full of water, and I placed them near the edge of a table. And then I put a piece of cardboard over top of the jars. Try and visualize it. If I'm not, you can probably Google and find the egg drop. And then above each jar, I put an empty toilet paper roll, and on top of that, I put an egg now a raw fresh egg.

I didn't trick doing tricks with the egg. I didn't pull out the yolk. I didn't hard boil them. And the trick to the egg drop is a broom. I took a broom, an old-fashioned broom with the straw at the bottom, and I put it near the edge of the table, and I would pull back on that broom. And the trick to this is you let it go as hard as it can,

the broom hits the edge of the table and stops. But if you set it up right, it knocks the cardboard out. And you know what happens? Because of the law of inertia and the way gravity works, the eggs drop straight down into the jars and the light weighted toilet paper rolls and the cardboard shoot away. And students are amazed. All right? They go, what? How did that work?

And then you've created confusion. They can't believe it happened. I encourage you to look up the egg drop. And if we can find a good video demonstration, I'll make sure we get it on our instant. Instagram feed. And the other one is just open-ended questions to students, a question that doesn't have any answer at all. You know, the classic one in philosophy is why.

Just one word, why? What's the answer to that? And I've never found out if this is true or not, but the proverbial sort of myth in undergraduate education is that that's the essay topic, you write a single word, because, and you walk out. I'd love to know if that's true or not. But these moments of confusion, that's where learning occurs.

Now, not all types of confusion are helpful. Neuroscience actually suggests two very different forms. There's productive confusion, which is what we've been talking about. The problem is challenging, but it's still solvable. The brain stage is engaged. People are curious. That leads to learning and insights. But then there's overload confusion, which isn't a problem.

is productive. All right. This happens when something is too complex and you get confused. You don't have enough knowledge to act on something so you get confused. And you can even get confused when cognitive load, which we've talked about before, is just simply too high. And when you have overload confusion, people feel frustration. They're tired. They get mentally tired and they disengage because the brain's basically going, I can't figure this out. And that's the confusion you probably thought of when I first said the word confusion, because that's what we typically think of. We don't think of the productive form of confusion, where you're challenged, but not overwhelmed. Now, what's interesting is there are people in the world that experience less confusion. We call them experts. Now,

why is that? These people have more experience. It literally boils down to that. So they have what would call a better internal model of the world. If you think of my egg drop, if you really know your physics, you could predict that the eggs would drop into the jars. All right, if you think of my example from the outside of the show driving home, when you turn the corner and you see the roads closed, you quickly adapt because you've got a better model of how to get home so you know there's an alternate route. So with expertise, our brains make more accurate predictions, but we're also better able to adapt. So as a result, experts experience confusion less often. But what happens is when they do get confused, they get an extremely large amount of information because it's novel to them. And if we go back to

this idea of prediction errors, if you measure brainwaves, which I was telling you about, experts tend to have smaller prediction error signals because their expectations are really well tuned. But when something truly unexpected happens, you get a large prediction error and you change your view of the world. So I want to finish by just wrapping this up a bit. Most people think that confusion has a bad reputation. People, you know, you think that it means that you're not smart. You're not paying attention. You're just not good at it. But as I've said, neuroscience shows the opposite. Confusion is the brain detecting a gap in understanding. And that gap is exactly where you're not. learning lives. So the next time you feel confused, it might not mean you're failing. It might mean

your brain is about to figure something out. I hope you enjoyed the neuroscience of confusion. Just a reminder, we have our website, that neuroscience guide.com links to Etsy and Patreon. Etsy, for those of you buying the merch, thank you so much. I'm hoping this season we'll get up some new ideas and some new logos. And on Patreon, thank you so much that those of you, you that support us. You know, a dollar a week, a couple dollars a month, it really adds up with all the listeners we have, and it helps out the graduate students in my research laboratory. So thank you for that. And of course, Instagram, we're doing really well there. Thanks to Jen, one of our co-producers. Matt does the sound. Jen does our social and planning. Check it out. She's always got cool content

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and we'll be with you for another couple of months before we need a break. My name is Olive Craig Olson and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.