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Surprise! – How the brain learns to deal with the unexpected

Mouse peeking through a hole in a wall
Growing up, the brain becomes more efficient at processing surprises. Studies on mice show the developments that take place. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

For children, the world is full of surprises. Adults, on the other hand, are much more difficult to surprise. And there are complex processes behind this apparently straightforward state of affairs. Researchers at the University of Basel have been using mice to decode how reactions to the unexpected develop in the growing brain.

03 January 2024 | Angelika Jacobs

Mouse peeking through a hole in a wall
Growing up, the brain becomes more efficient at processing surprises. Studies on mice show the developments that take place. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

Babies love playing peekaboo, continuing to react even on the tenth sudden appearance of their partner in the game. Recognizing the unexpected is an important cognitive ability. After all, “new” can also mean “dangerous”.

The exact way in which surprises are processed in the brain changes as we grow, however: unusual stimuli are much more quickly categorized as “important” or “uninteresting”, and are significantly less surprising the second and third time they appear. This increased efficiency makes perfect sense: new stimuli may gain our attention, but do not cause an unnecessarily strong reaction that costs us energy. While this may appear trivial at first, so far there has been very little research into this fact in the context of brain development.

Experiments with young mice conducted by Professor Tania Barkat’s research team have now begun to decode how the developing brain processes surprising sounds and what changes as we grow up. The researchers have reported on their findings in the journal Science Advances.

Strange sounds

In their experiments, the researchers used sequences of sounds in which a different tone was heard at irregular intervals in between a series of identical ones. At the same time, they recorded the animals’ brain waves. This process is known as the “oddball paradigm”, and is used by health professionals for purposes such as the diagnosis of schizophrenia.


Original publication

Patricia Valerio, Julien Rechenmann, Suyash Joshi, Gioia De Franceschi, Tania Rinaldi Barkat
Sequential maturation of stimulus-specific adaptation in the mouse lemniscal 4 auditory system
Science Advances (2024), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi7624

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