Why your brain glitches — 5 everyday 'errors' that actually make you smarter

If you’ve ever blurted a wrong answer, stared at the ceiling with a word stuck “right there,” or zoned out during a meeting only to have a clever idea two minutes later—you’re in good company.

We call these moments “glitches,” but many of them are actually features of a well-tuned learning system.

After years of analyzing data for a living and then switching to writing about human behavior, I’ve learned this: the brain gets better by bumping into its own limits.

Small stumbles create information your mind can use.

Let me show you five common, slightly embarrassing slip-ups that—counterintuitive as it sounds—sharpen your thinking.

1. Guessing wrong is a learning accelerant

Ever found yourself in a pub quiz shouting an answer you think is right… only to hear the correct one and groan?

Here’s the twist: that wrong guess can make the correct answer stick far longer than if you’d just been told it from the start.

Psychologists Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays, and Robert Bjork ran a series of experiments where people tried to answer questions they mostly couldn’t answer.

When feedback arrived (the right answer), those earlier failed attempts actually boosted later memory for the material. As they put it, “unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhanced learning.”

I love that line because it flips our intuition on its head.

If you want to feel this in your day-to-day life, try “pre-testing” yourself before you study or look something up.

Pose a question—What’s the capital of X?—and take a stab, even if you suspect you’ll be wrong. Then check.

The act of reaching activates the memory system; the feedback seals it.

The same principle softens the sting of wrong turns at work: hazard a draft, solicit corrections, and you’ll internalize the fix more firmly than if you’d waited to get it “perfect.”

2. The tip-of-the-tongue moment is your memory training, not failing

That maddening “I know it… give me a second” feeling? It’s not a bug; it’s a workout.

When a name or term hangs just out of reach, your brain is running a search query through a noisy index.

The effort may not produce the word immediately, but it tunes the pathways you’ll need the next time.

The same researchers above found that even failed retrieval attempts prime the system for better encoding once the correct answer appears.

That’s exactly what a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) moment is: a failed retrieval attempt. When you finally look up the word (or your friend supplies it), your brain updates the index—and future recall gets easier.

Not every TOT pays off instantly, of course, and you’ll still want to avoid guessing in high-stakes situations. But in everyday learning, that little itch to remember is doing you a favor.

Try this micro-habit: when a word stalls, give yourself 5–10 seconds to search your mind before you Google it.

If it doesn’t surface, check the answer, then immediately say it aloud and use it in a sentence.

Short, simple, sticky.

3. Zoning out can seed creative breakthroughs

I’m a trail runner on weekends, and I can’t count how many times a stuck paragraph untangles itself somewhere between mile three and a patch of wild fennel.

That’s not magic; it’s mind-wandering doing its quiet work.

In a widely cited experiment, Benjamin Baird and colleagues asked people to work on a classic creativity task (coming up with unusual uses for an object).

After a break, those who did an undemanding task—something that freed the mind to drift—showed the biggest post-break gains on the original problem.

In their words, “engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance.” Translation: letting your attention meander can help the brain recombine ideas. 

This isn’t a free pass to ignore your boss during the budget review. It is a nudge to build “open attention” time into your day.

Take a short walk without a podcast. Wash dishes. Pull weeds.

Your default-mode network (the brain’s background chatter system) and executive network (the planning system) get chances to talk to each other in those moments, and that conversation births insight.

4. Being surprised by outcomes rewires your predictions

Ever say, “This email will take two minutes,” and twenty minutes later you’re still rewriting sentence three?

That prediction error—the gap between what you expected and what happened—isn’t just humbling. It’s a training signal your brain relies on.

Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz and colleagues famously showed that midbrain dopamine neurons fire like little math teachers, spiking when outcomes are better than expected and dipping when they’re worse.

In plainer language, these cells encode errors in your predictions and adjust future expectations accordingly. That’s how habits get refined and why small surprises (good or bad) are so educational.

The authors note that dopaminergic activity “signals changes or errors in the predictions of future salient and rewarding events.”

You can use that to your advantage by surfacing your expectations. Before a task, jot a quick forecast: time required, likely pitfalls, next steps.

Afterward, compare results. You’re creating clean “before/after” data for your brain’s teacher signal, accelerating calibration.

Over time, you’ll get eerily accurate about scoping projects and setting your own deadlines.

5. Small slip-ups trigger smarter control on the next try

You hit “reply all.” You click the wrong cell in a spreadsheet. You pour oat milk into your coffee mug after you’ve already tossed in the tea bag (just me?).

As annoying as these micro-errors are, they tend to produce a reliable pattern: you slow down a beat and pay sharper attention on the very next attempt.

Under the hood, that’s prediction-error learning at work again.

The system registers “this action didn’t produce the outcome I expected,” and—without a lecture—nudges you toward a corrective policy: slow down, check the recipient list, hover over the cell before hitting enter.

One mistake can shift a hundred future choices. If you track your own “oopses,” you’ll notice this adjustment loop in real time: error → pause → better policy.

It’s the same brain machinery that helps us learn from a mistimed step on a trail or an overzealous email in the office.

A practical tweak: when you catch a slip, quickly note the cue that preceded it (e.g., “I was multitasking” or “the dropdown defaults changed”).

Then decide a tiny “if–then” rule: If I’m replying in a big thread, then I’ll scan the “To:” field before typing. You’re turning a glitch into a guardrail.

Bringing it together

The through-line in all five “errors” is simple: the brain is a prediction-and-update machine. \It needs friction—failed guesses, missing words, wandering attention, surprises, little flubs—to collect the data that makes tomorrow’s thinking cleaner.

If you want to harness these moments:

• Invite safe errors. Pre-test yourself, sketch draft hypotheses, and ask for quick feedback. Your future self remembers better when today’s self risks being wrong.

• Schedule creative drift. A 10-minute mundane break can be a powerhouse for novel connections.

• Write mini-forecasts. Each miss refines your internal model; each hit strengthens it. Either way, you get smarter.

We tend to idolize frictionless “flow.” But a life with no errors is a life with no new information. The next time your brain glitches, don’t just roll your eyes.

Ask, What is this trying to teach me?

Chances are, quite a lot.