Culture
February 3, 2025
What birds and pigs can teach us about how learning works.
Prefer watching videos to reading blogs? I don’t blame you. I cover the main points of this blog post here – in this <4 minute Ignite Talk that I gave at WPP Stream 2024.
But if you’re like me, and you prefer to read about things, then here you go!
I was on a flight back from Asia the other week and noticed several people in the airport were playing…. Angry Birds! A game that launched (literally!) a dozen years ago.
Have you ever wondered why Angry Birds is so addictive? It’s evolutionary. We’ve evolved to play these games. We’ve evolved to learn this way – through play.
Angry Birds is a physics puzzle that helps your brain develop a mental model for parabolic flight.
Think back to the first time you played the game - what happened? It probably went like this….
You pulled the bird back in the slingshot, fired at the tower of pigs, and - you missed.
And when you missed, the pigs laughed at you. That made you frustrated.
On the second shot, you improved your aim, and landed a little closer to the tower, but you still missed. Your frustration increased.
You aimed a little better when you fired that third bird - and boom - you hit the tower. Cartoon pigs exploded everywhere, accompanied by satisfying animations, audio and music.
This was all deliberately designed to trigger a dopamine release in your brain. Dopamine increases neuroplasticity. That dopamine physically reinforced the same neural pathways you used on the last successful fire. It literally made those neural connections thicker. Your brain developed a mental model of parabolic flight.
This video illustrates neural network ‘honing’ under the influence of dopamine:
(This is similar, by the way, to how ChatGPT’s virtual neurons are ‘trained’ - but that’s a separate topic)
An hour later you were firing that bird between two narrow obstacles at 50 yards. 60 hours later, you were still playing the game.
The games industry didn’t invent this neuromechanic. We’ve evolved to learn this way. This is precisely how our ancestors learned how to throw spears millennia ago. They played with it. They threw that spear over and over again, continuously missing a target while their frustration built up. When they finally hit the target, the rewarding rush of dopamine thickened the neural connections they had used on that last successful throw. This is how they learned.
This is one of a thousand tools in a game designer’s toolbox. By precisely balancing reward and frustration over time, you can maximize the release of dopamine when the user does the right thing. This reinforces those neural pathways – physically imprinting that mental model. This is one of the most direct and effective ways to accelerate learning - in Angry Birds, in medicine, and beyond.