Question: I was told recently that 'experts' in a subject still have the natural misconceptions of others, but can somehow override these assumptions due to regular reinforcing of correct pathways. . . pruning of sorts?

Joseph Devlin answered on 22 Apr 2015:

There is some cool work by Kevin Dunbar’s group on this topic (e.g. http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/FugelsangSteinGreenDunbarCJEP2004.pdf.) In this case, he showed two different groups of people videos of true scientific results that did not fit with naive expectations (people assume the larger/heavier one will fall faster). He tested normal university students, on the one hand, and physics students (who presumably know better) on the other. What they found was that the non-physicists showed increased activation in their anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) — a part of the brain know for “error detection” (indeed, it is sometimes referred to as the “oh shit” center). When he showed these videos to physics majors, he saw increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — a region important for cognitive control. Presumably DLPFC plays a role in suppressing the “oh shit” response and this gets reinforced with repetition. As Iroise says, learning is essentially all about strengthening some connections in the brain and weakening (pruning) others. So although Dunbar’s study didn’t directly assess the learning mechanism, it does point to certain brain structures that might be important in the process.